National Weatherperson's Day Release (3.2)

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01-31-2019 05:31 PM
IsmaelChivite
Esri Notable Contributor
11 33 4,975

National Weatherperson's Day, also known as National Weatherman's Day, is observed on February 5 primarily in the United States. It recognizes individuals in the fields of meteorology, weather forecasting and broadcast meteorology, as well as volunteer storm spotters and observers. It is observed on the birthday of John Jeffries, one of the United States' first weather observers who took daily measurements starting in 1774. Jeffries also made the first balloon flight over London in 1784 with the purpose of gathering data for a scientific study of the air at high altitudes.

Our forecast for the 3.2 release is as follows: Bright like the sun, new features and enhancements in the morning, particularly in the Survey123 website and web designer. A joyful rain of fixes for the Survey123 field app at night, including massive improvements to repeats and nested repeats. 

Pages for your web forms

In this update you can organize questions in your surveys across multiple pages. Pages are particularly useful when working on very large forms, helping you logically organize your questions and giving end users a sense of progress across the entire survey.

In the example above, I added a welcome image and text on the first page to create a cover for  my survey. Note that the first page does not expect any input from the survey. It is just a welcoming page, or cover.  Next, I organized the actual questions within my form into pages, giving each page a descriptive title at the top.  As users move from page to page, a progress bar at the bottom shows how close they are to the end of the survey.

You can combine groups and pages to further help organize questions within your survey!

If you use web designer to create your surveys, you will find that we have added a Page option in the main panel. Just like you do with other question types, simply click on Page, and it will be added to your form. You will be able to drag and drop questions into your new page, move questions from one page to another and even merge and duplicate pages!

If you want to work with pages in Survey123 Connect, you need to do two things:

  • First, in the settings worksheet of your XLSForm, you will set the value of the style column to pages.
  • Then, in the survey worksheet, you will use the field-list appearance for any XLSForm begin_group question type that you want to turn into a page. 

Also note that when using the pages style, pages will be automatically created for any question outside field-list groups.

Whilst the implementation for pages is complete in our web form, currently in the field app constraint and required checks will not be performed when you leave a page.  These checks will only be done when you attempt to submit the survey. In some scenarios this can make it difficult for end users to identify the exact question in the form where the validation rules were broken. Make sure you define good error messages for your required and constraint rules. Other than that, pages work pretty well in the field app!

Embedded public web forms

You can now embed public web forms in your own web site. As shown below, the Collaborate tab of your survey will now include an Embed option from which you can copy the HTML code needed to embed your survey within a web site.

A handful of embed options let you quickly configure your embed HTML code to hide elements of your survey that you may want to hide, such as the header, sign-in, multiple language options, footer, etc.  You can even disable the theme colors to provide a more neutral presence of your embedded survey within the web site.

Below is an example showing a Survey123 form embedded within a web page.  Note that the header, footer and themes have been disabled to make the survey fit better within the web site.

Better word clouds

The Survey123 website includes a number of reporting capabilities to help you understand data captured through your surveys. The Analyze page, for example, aggregates responses for categorical, date and number questions and creates charts and maps to more quickly identify trends on your data. 

Questions with free text are always trickier to aggregate, but that is where word clouds come to help. A word cloud takes the most common words found in your data and sizes them according to popularity. The bigger the word, the more repetitions. It is a simple concept but it often gives great insight.  Unfortunately, the most common words in our language are far from interesting in this context. Think about it: this, that, of, a...  all pretty useless stuff in a word cloud, don't you think?  These words are known as stop-words, and now you can set a filter to ignore them. In English at least.

Here you can see how word cloud filters made a difference for our friends at City of Lakeland, in Florida:

In this particular scenario, the survey asked people in the city 'What are your thoughts on how can we better educate drivers to pay attention?'. The most popular words among the responses are 'the', 'and', 'to' and 'of', but if we  apply the stop word filter, much more relevant words will come out:  speed, signs and people.  With stop word filters you can more easily understand certain relevant trends in your data.

More on custom themes

We introduced Custom Themes not long ago. Definitely a good addition to give your surveys a nice final touch! If you haven't already, I highly recommend you watch this video-tutorial or read the Introducing Custom Themes blog post.

In this update 6 new theme templates have been added. 5 of them will help you quickly switch through different color combinations. You can also make tweaks in them, of course, but they provide a nice start.  The sixth template is more interesting, in that it will mirror the Shared Theme of your ArcGIS organization.  If you are not familiar with this concept of Shared Theme, have a look at Ian's blog post Introducing Shared Theme: a new app styling capability in ArcGIS Online.  The Shared Theme is set by the administrator of an ArcGIS Organization defining the basics for styling configurable apps in it: text and background color, etc.  Now, you can easily match that style!

Web designer: Option to automatically center map at the device's location in web forms

A new option has been added in web designer to automatically center the map at the user's location when a geopoint question is open within a web form.

Lets describe in more detail what is going on here, because this option only makes sense once differences between the behavior of geopoint questions across web forms and the Survey123 field app are understood. 

Geopoint questions in the Survey123 field app are by default centered at the user's location. In a Web Form, the behavior is very different.  When your geopoint questions are shown within a web browser, the location of the map remains as set by the author of the survey. The Survey123 web app by default will not attempt to gather the user's location. Otherwise, as soon as the survey is loaded, the web browser will automatically present a dialog to the end user asking for permission to gather the device's location.  Without proper context on why that  message is appearing, this would cause distrust in many users.

The user can change the location of the map by either manually panning the map or centering it at a particular address or at the user's location. By enabling this new option, the map, once in edit mode, will automatically center to the user's location.  This will trigger the web browser to require confirmation before handing over the location to the Survey123 web app, but this will happen in context.  Users will understand at that point why the survey is attempting to gather their location.

For the reasons described above, this new setting has no effect when the survey is loaded in the Survey123 field app.

Other enhancements and fixes

Survey123 Website

  • BUG-000112899 Publishing a survey on survey123.arcgis.com connected to a Portal for ArcGIS using Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) returns the error message, "Unable to publish the survey. Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0".
  • BUG-000116898 Renaming the survey under 'Edit Survey Info' in survey123.arcgis.com will cause the feature service to change the name from _fieldworker to _stakeholder.
  • BUG-000117623 When survey123.arcgis.com is accessed via Portal and only one record is present in the service, the default extent and zoom level configured on the survey are not honored when viewing from the Data tab.
  • BUG-000116269 When printing a web map in a custom report from the Survey123 for ArcGIS website, at least one element of the web map must be public, otherwise the error message, "An error occurred while generating report(s)" is returned.
  • BUG-000117239 Survey123 does not honor survey’s viewer collaboration with a group in ArcGIS Online if the survey has been authored through Survey123 Connect using an ArcGIS Server secured feature service added to ArcGIS Online as item with Credentials stored.
  • BUG-000116800 Reports generated from the Survey123 for ArcGIS website show the Object ID as a date.
  • BUG-000116268 When printing custom reports from survey123.arcgis.com, the web map in the report fails to display all layers in the map.
  • BUG-000118284 In Survey123 for ArcGIS, the map scale setting is not honored when including a map in a report.
  • BUG-000118703 Surveys with calculate type questions that use pulldata() on a geopoint question within an if statement display the error "Error: Initialing Form... FormLogicError: pulldata with incorrect number of parameters found: pulldata('@geopoint', // , '')" and load without form logic when opened in the Survey123 Web App.
  • Custom Reports can now access all fields within the underlying feature service.
  • Custom Report syntax in Microsoft Word documents is now checked immediately after uploading the template.
  • Added support for the XLSForm function @property in Web Forms.

Survey123 Connect

  • Survey123 Connect will no longer overwrite survey settings (such as web hook configurations) updated through the Survey123 website.
  • BUG-000111392 Survey123 Connect installed on a Windows 2012 R2 machine crashes when publishing a survey to Portal for ArcGIS 10.5.1 configured with enterprise logins.
  • BUG-000119026 Delete refresh token stored in SecureStorage if auto login fails with invalid refreshtoken error.
  • BUG-000097165 - Copy images used for form background into the media folder.

Survey123 Field App

  • Various fixes affecting repeats and nested repeats (BUG-000117852, BUG-000117987, BUG-000118094, BUG-000118449 and many others).
    • BUG-000117852 : Surveys for geopoint, picture and select one questions are not displayed for the second and subsequent repeat questions/related tables in sent folder if those questions are relevant questions.
    • BUG-000117987 : Calculation fields fails to retain submitted values in Inbox if the field are part of "Repeats".
    • BUG-000118094 Relevancy questions within repeats do not save the information when the survey is saved as a draft.
    • BUG-000118449 : When including a signature field in a relevancy controlled group within a repeat in Survey123 Connect, the first signature entered is not displayed in the outbox (drafts).
  • BUG-000117493 "SSL Handshake failed (6)" error is generated in Survey123 app when using Android 7.0 or higher and using non-CA certificates for Portal.
  • BUG-000110786 - Survey123 cannot change from an Windows Authentication (IWA) portal to another.
  • BUG-000113293, BUG-000113294 - User signed out when losing network connection.
  • BUG-000098854: Survey123 App Portal cannot be added after tapping "Add Portal" in Windows Mobile.
  • BUG-000118375 Mathematical calculations from Inbox do not trigger when NaN or null values are used.
  • BUG-000106578, BUG-000112873 - When choice_filter used, the name text is saved as the data value, instead of the label text.

Did you know that using XLSForm you can choose to save the label of the selected item in a list instead of the name? For more details see: https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2018/12/02/survey123-tricks-of-the-trade-xlsform-fu... 

  • ENH-000109073 - Include a comma (thousands separator) in decimal questions.
  • Various bug fixes for localization issues.

For more details on the 3.2 release, check out our What's New Help Topic, which also includes an archive of all new features added in previous releases.

33 Comments
MikeOnzay
Occasional Contributor III
  • BUG-000098854: Survey123 App Portal cannot be added after taping "Add Portal" in Windows Mobile.

I think the word should be "tapping" instead of "taping"

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Mike, good spot there, however that was actually how the support analyst created the tech support bug issue, the title reflects how it was originally logged for that BUG number.

IsmaelChivite
Esri Notable Contributor

Good catch on that one Mike. I wish some of the bugs in this release were so easy to fix as that! Updated text in blog post to bring correct spelling. I will send a note to the Tech Support analyst too.

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

I am curious (I have not tested this yet), but can we use the coding for "new" embedding of an online survey form to embed a survey within an Outlook 365 email? Just a question out of curiosity.

NicolasRoger
Occasional Contributor

Thank you for this update.

Is there any way we can take a look at this bug report?:

Various fixes affecting repeats and nested repeats (BUG-000117852, BUG-000117987, BUG-000118094, BUG-000118449 and many others).

I am doing a lot of repeat calculation in one of my survey and I would like to see if I was affected by those bug.

IsmaelChivite
Esri Notable Contributor

Hi Nicolas. Here are  the descriptions.  I added them into the post above as well. I am checking with Esri Tech Support to see if the BUG info can be exported into MyEsri or Esri Support Home  so they can more easily be found.

BUG-000117852 : Surveys for geopoint, picture and select one questions are not displayed for the second and subsequent repeat questions/related tables in sent folder if those questions are relevant questions.
BUG-000117987 : Calculation fields fails to retain submitted values in Inbox if the field are part of "Repeats".
BUG-000118094 Relevancy questions within repeats do not save the information when the survey is saved as a draft
BUG-000118449 : When including a signature field in a relevancy controlled group within a repeat in Survey123 Connect, the first signature entered is not displayed in the outbox (drafts).

BrianBrown6
New Contributor

Thanks for implementing pages, something we have been looking forward to. For the validation in the field app, will validating on next page be available in a future release? For my use case, this behavior is preferred in the field app then the web as some users may not fill out each page out sequentially. If you do bring validation on a page basis to the field app in a future release, would be useful to have some way to choose on a page or submit basis

IsmaelChivite
Esri Notable Contributor

Thanks Brian for your comment. For now, pages in the field app are  going to remain as they are. We will keep your note in mind before any changes are applied to the app. Your point is well taken: You prefer validation to happen on submit  because you want  to  give people flexibility to jump between pages even if their contents are not complete.

KYTCGIS
New Contributor III

Hi - question on a change I've noticed since this release in a survey that was already published.  I'm wondering if it relates back to this:

  • ENH-000109073 - Include a comma (thousands separator) in decimal questions.

I have an integer field which is populated from a pull data function based on the username.  It is a four digit integer which does not need commas within it and prior to last week, it did not have commas. 

When you are in the field app, instead of listing the entire four digit Unit Number, the field now lists the first three digits of the number in the form #,## and because I have a field length limit of four on the question, the fourth digit is not listed and users must delete the comma before being able to input their full Unit Number which should have been pre-populated.  Screenshots are below showing the value as it is viewed correctly in the CSV, the XLS, Survey123 Connect, and how it is incorrectly viewed in the field app. 

This field was functioning correctly and is now changed.  Any idea on how to fix it or what caused it?  From searching solutions I've seen the option of changing it to a text field and only allowing number entry (https://community.esri.com/thread/203336-remove-commas-from-integer-field-type ) but this seems a bit silly to have to do for a strictly numeric field.  

XLS:  

XLS

CSV:

CSV

Survey123 Connect:

Connect

Field App:

Field App

I'd appreciate any and all feedback.  Also, if this isn't related to the update please let me know and I can create a question for this instead of commenting it here. 

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi KYTC GIS,

Yes, you are correct, in our 3.2 release we have improved the honouring for locale formatting for numbers. Previously the Survey123 field app did not honour locale formatting, such as thousand separator and decimal comma, different locales use commas or decimals for either. We had a few outstanding bugs related this this issue which have now been resolved. Therefore in 3.2 we now honour the locale the device is set to. This will affect integer and decimal question types.

In your case, it is actually incorrect to use a field length on an integer field. Field length is designed for limiting string fields which by default may be much larger then required, or need to be set larger than default. In the case of an integer, the way the database stores the values as binary does not require a field length to be set and has no purpose.

In your case, it is better to use an input mask of 9999 on the integer field, which will constrain the field to only allow 4 numbers, and using an input mask will also override the lcoale formatting and ignore it, so you will not see the comma.

Hope this helps.

Phil.

zkovacs
Occasional Contributor III

Thanks for the update!

A bit of a heads up, this new release brakes spinners on number fields - I'm about the raise it as a bug with Support.

I have tested it with the previous release (v3.1.158, both on an iPad and on Windows PC) and spinners worked OK. When upgrading to this latest version, spinners stop working at all. Nothing to do with the form, it can easily be replicated with a new survey as I have just done that too...

Edit: The same issue can be seen in the latest version of Connect too (3.2.196) when previewing the form. (I have just upgraded to the latest version as I was curious to see if it happens there too.)

Zoltan

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Zoltan,

Thanks for the feedback, we will look into the issue with spinners and the 3.2 release and get back to you shortly.

Thanks,

Phil.

zkovacs
Occasional Contributor III

Thanks Phil! (PM me if you need my screen recordings.)

BrandonArmstrong
Esri Regular Contributor

Hi Zoltan,

This looks to be a defect with version 3.2, thank you for bringing it to our attention. 

One workaround might be to apply a default value for the question, which will then allow for the  and  controls to add and subtract values as desired.  We will look into investigating this issue further in the meantime, and provide an update when we have one.

Thanks,

Brandon

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Zoltan,

We have a fix for this issue and it is available in the 3.3 beta builds available on EAC, the new builds will be uploaded in the next 24 hours to EAC.

Please test it out and let us know if any further issues, if all is good then this fix will be available in the 3.3 public release at the end of the month.

Regards,

Phil.

zkovacs
Occasional Contributor III

Hi Brandon,

Thanks, I've found the same workaround. 🙂

Zoltan

zkovacs
Occasional Contributor III

Hi Phil,

That's great, I'll test it as soon as the new build is available on EAC and report back.

Zoltan

zkovacs
Occasional Contributor III

Hi Phil,

I've tested the latest Windows (3.3.51) and Android (3.3.51) field apps on EAC and spinners work OK in those. It seems to me that the iOS version in TestFlight has not been updated though. I have tested the 3.3.40 version for iOS via TestFlight nevertheless, and unfortunately spinners don't work in that one. I hope this helps.

Zoltan

ZhifangWang
Esri Regular Contributor

Hi Mike Bruening‌,

Embedding a Survey123 survey directly in an email has not been tested (probably cannot work), if you are interested or it's important, it would be great if you can raise it in ArcGIS Idea so other users can vote for it too.

Thanks,

Zhifang

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Zoltan,

Thanks for the feedback. It can sometimes take a few days extra for Testflight to be updated as it has to be approved and released by Apple, we upload at same time as we put on EAC, hopefully it is available for you now.

Phil.

zkovacs
Occasional Contributor III

Hi Phil,

Right, that makes sense. I have checked this morning, and v3.3.51 was available via TestFlight for iOS. Spinners worked without any issues.

Kind regards,

Zoltan

NicolasRoger
Occasional Contributor

ENH-000109073 - Include a comma (thousands separator) in decimal questions.

I have some user reporting that they can no longer write decimal separator. For exemple, they can no longer write 10.5 . Nor 10,5   .  They have an Android device with French canadian local. Something broke with the update! In our locale, the decimal separator is officialy "," but we are fine with using either ",' or ".".  The problem is that now none of them work. When they write ".", they quickly see the dot appear then disappear in the field.

BrandonArmstrong
Esri Regular Contributor

Hi Nicolas,

Is the manufacturer of these Android devices Samsung?

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Nicolas,

What locale are the devices set to and what default keyboard are they using? Does the locale the devices are set to use a comma as the default decimal separator? Survey123 now honours the default locale settings so will honour the thousand separator rand decimal to be used from the system locale. If you want to use a different locale format, you need to set it in the survey using a different locale, or set the system to a different locale that has the format you want.

There are some known bugs with Samsung and other Android keyboards where in different locales the wring decimal or comma is displayed, you can workaround this by using a different keyboard such a Gboard or Swiftkey.

Phil.

DougBrowning
MVP Esteemed Contributor

I have a note field that tells the user the number of minutes that have passed since starting the form.  At 3.0 the minutes changed each time I added a repeat - which is what I want.  After upgrading to 3.2 the field is no longer updating at all.

 

Both outside of a repeat

Field 1

Type Name         Label              Calc

time StartedForm Started at      once(now())

 

Field 2

Type Name           Label                            Calc

note MinsElapsed Minutes Elapsed          round(int(now() - ${StartedForm}) div (1000*60),1)

 

Again this was working great under 3.0 but never updates on 3.2.

thanks

NicolasRoger
Occasional Contributor

Ok I got more information. Device is an "LG X-Power2" running android.

My user says that he didn't download any particular keyboard but that the keyboard that appear in the Survey123 app is different than the one he usualy see in his other apps.

Screenshot of the keyboard:

The survey has been created in a French (Canadian) Locale and the devices are also in that locale. For our locale, the proper decimal separator would be a coma and no thousand seperator at all. But to be clear, we don't really care if the decimal separator is a dot or a coma. We simply want it to work with one or the other. Right now both don't work.

Philip Wilson a écrit:

 If you want to use a different locale format, you need to set it in the survey using a different locale, or set the system to a different locale that has the format you want.

 

How would I do that in Surver123 connect?

Thank you for your answers

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Nicolas,

The keyboard issue above (screenshot) is a bug with the default keyboard on the device (you can google and find this reported by other apps too), it is trying to use a numeric only keyboard, which is why it may appear different in other apps that use full keyboard, but displaying the wrong locale formatted keyboard. Please trying use a different keyboard downloaded from the Play Store such as Swiftkey, Gboard or any of the many others.

You can find the documentation here for multiple language support, which will change the locale of the survey: Multiple language support—Survey123 for ArcGIS | ArcGIS 

Or this great blog post: https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2019/01/23/introducing-multiple-language-surveys 

Regards,

Phil.

NicolasRoger
Occasional Contributor

Hi Philip,

Setting the survey default Language to English (en) instead of French (fr) solved the problem of the decimal separator not working on those device. So it's a nice workaround for us. Thank you.

I notice that this also change the calendar date to english (showing "Monday" instead of "Lundi"). I know It is impossible to make it appear french if a change the language, but is there any way to change the date format to simply show numbers? Something like "22-02-2019". That would be a nice workaround and would completly solve our problem. I tried all the settings in the "Appearence" field for this datetime question and none seems to do what I need.

Thank you

RobertMarros
Occasional Contributor II

Is the Point to Point Measurement functionality now supported in Survey123 using Spike? If so, is it possible to update the Spike survey template in Survey123 connect with this functionality? 

Thanks

#survey123 support#survey123 design#spike

IsmaelChivite
Esri Notable Contributor

Hi Robert Marros‌    Point to Point measurements will be made available in version 3.3, which we plan on releasing this coming week.  You will ALSO need to update your Spike app for P2P to work in Survey123 v 3.3 or newer.

RobertMarros
Occasional Contributor II

Ismael,

That is great news since we are planning on testing out the Spike integration with Survey123 in the next coming weeks. Will the Spike Survey12 template be updated as well?

Thanks! 

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi Robert,

Yes, shortly after the release announcement for 3.3 and the apps being available to download, we update the templates available in Connect, this will include the new Spike sample. It may not happen right away, but usually within a few hours or the following day, there is just a process we have to follow that takes some time.

Phil.

RobertMarros
Occasional Contributor II

Sounds great! Thanks Philip!