We owe to those who with their genius inventions have made our lives easier. Inventor’s Day celebrates their ideas and occurs in some countries such as United Kingdom, Austria, United States and a few others. Argentina celebrates the Inventor’s Day on September 29, birthday of László József Bíró who invented the ballpoint pen. Ballpoint pens and forms have a long history together, so we thought we would devote this update to this great inventor.
Here are the highlights of what is new in this release:
- Export to CSV enhancements: Some of you want to extract your survey data into CSV format so you can easily import it into Microsoft Excel and other tools. As of this release, the CSV column names will honor the label set on your survey questions. This enhancement is particularly handy if you have designed your survey using the Survey123 web site: No more cryptic column headers! Just as a reminder, the export to csv option is available from the Data tab at survey123.arcgis.com.
- Launch the Survey123 mobile app from a Web Map popup: You can now configure Web Map popups in ArcGIS to launch the Survey123 mobile app. A classic example is when you want the popup of an asset to let you easily launch Survey123, load a particular inspection form and even prepopulate some questions using attributes from that asset. To learn more about how to do this, have a look at the Understanding the Survey123 URL scheme blog post, which was recently updated.
- Automatic download of surveys when Survey123 is launched remotely: This one is also closely related to the use of Survey123’s custom URL scheme. Up until this release, you could not remotely open surveys in the mobile app unless they had already been downloaded into the device first. Starting with 1.8, if the survey you want to open is not present in the device already, Survey123 will attempt to download it automatically, and then open it.
- Support compulsory questions within a repeat: In Survey123, you can include compulsory questions in your forms by simply flagging them as required. This enables you to prevent end-users from submitting incomplete forms. With this update, we are extending support for required questions to those included within a repeat block.
- Enhancements to the pulldata function: We introduced the pulldata function in 1.7 as the means to preloading data into your survey using CSV files. With 1.8, you can also use pulldata to extract multiple attributes from geopoint questions. For example, you can extract the X and Y coordinates as well as, if your device is able to provide this information, its elevation, horizontal-vertical accuracy and even the speed and direction of your device when the location was captured. This is extremely useful if you want to store the X,Y,Z coordinates as attributes in your features, but also to add constraints in your form to warn users if the accuracy of the captured location is not sufficient. The syntax of an expression using pulldata for extracting the horizontal accuracy from a geopoint question looks something like this:
pulldata("@geopoint", ${location}, "horizontalAccuracy")
For a quick display of this new feature in action, load the new Calculate Location From Geopoint sample in Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS.
- Support for 3D Feature Services: Through the bind::esri:FieldType column in your XLSForm, you can define the exact way in which attributes will be stored in your feature service. In this release, we have added support for the value esriFieldTypePointZ, which will turn your Survey123 feature service into 3D, allowing you to store the elevation of locations in the geometry column itself.
There are a handful of other miscellaneous fixes and improvements, which are detailed in the What is New Help topic. As usual, we want to thank all of you who helped us with your feedback getting this release out.
