GIS Request Management Solution - Actual Effort field

[KassieKM]

I've been testing out the GIS management solution for the last week - tweaking things as I learn how to use it.

The following scenario is taking place on the Manage > GIS Activities page/interface of the GIS Request Manager Center -- 
On the update tab for a project, I added actual effort hours while it's status was set as "In Progress" and click Submit. Later, I updated the status for said project to "Awaiting Customer Feedback" and the actual effort hours entry was no longer available. I understand why it's not available as an option in the survey, but all actual effort hours also disappeared from the Effort bar chart above it. I looked in the effort feature class and the entry was also missing. It seems like by changing the status to "Awaiting Customer Feedback" it erased the entry?

So then I went into Survey Connect and for the actualeffort line I changed the relevant field to: ${status}='Completed' or ${status}='In Progress' or ${status}='Awaiting Customer Feedback'

This seemed to fix the problem, so long as I was only using the 3 statuses above. I tried switching the project status to Deferred and the actual hours were erased again. Is this what is meant to happen? Maybe I have something set up incorrectly?

Ultimately, I would like to change the project status to any of the options without the Actual Effort entries being deleted or overwritten. For now, I just removed all text from the relevant field, as mentioned above, and that seems to have solved the issue of the entries being overwritten. Of course then the Actual Effort field shows up on your survey all of the time, regardless of the status (which isn't a huge deal).

Posting here in case someone else runs across this issue or has any other suggestions. I am not very experienced with Survey 123 Connect, so I am learning as I go.

[DanielWickens · Accepted solution]

Hello @KassieKM -

In order to retain the actual effort records when switching the status, move the expression (${status}='Completed' or ${status}='In Progress') in the relevant field column to the body::esri::visible column of the Effort begin repeat row. Make sure there is nothing in the relevant field column in the actualeffort row. Save the XLS form and re-publish the survey.

The body::esri::visible column controls the visibility of a question through an XLS form expression, while the relevant column does the same, but also clears the value in the question when the expression evaluates to false.

So, the relevant column affects both the question's visibility AND its value. This can be both very useful and also sometimes problematic. For example, say a question is relevant and the user answers it. Now the user changes something in the form that makes that question not relevant. At that point, whatever value was entered in the question is cleared. That data is lost forever. This is often known as question skipping, which is different to simply controlling the visibility of a question.

Using the relevant column instead of body::esri:visible in this case is an oversight on our part in the design of the GIS Activity survey, and we'll address this in a later release of the solution. For now, the instructions above will fix the issue you're experiencing.

[KassieKM]

Thank you!