You're building a proof of concept survey for some invasive flora field work. You wish for your field workers to be able to define a quadrat boundary polygon and then complete multiple related surveys within that single polygon, recording point locations as they work. Furthermore, we want them to be able to revisit the same survey polygon and submit more location-based surveys if necessary.
Pre-requisite concepts to understand:
Survey123 Connect (desktop app) allows us to include 'repeats' within our published survey. These are related tables that get published in association with our survey feature layer. And while our Survey123 surveys can only include a single type of geometry question (point, line, or polygon), we can include additional geometry questions within our related tables...
The first thing you'll want to do, is download the Survey123 Connect desktop app and install it.
This will open Microsoft Excel in addition to Survey123 Connect. We use Excel to configure our survey form and take advantage of more advanced capabilities and customisations than can be acheived in the Survey123 web app. (See: ArcGIS Survey123: Web or Connect?)
You've just added the first field (column) to the attribute table of the feature layer that will get created in your web portal when this survey is published. The 'select_one' question indicates that we're going to define a domain (or Choice List) for this question. So now we need to create a list of permitted options associated with 'surveyor_name'...
Challenge - If you're completely new to this, challenge yourself to create another 'select_one' question that appears like this:
Now that we know the very basics of navigating our XLSForm, let's add some geometry, a related table, and some additional questions to this survey and feature layer:
typenamelabelappearancerepeat_count
Type | Name | Label | Appearance | Repeat_count |
select_one surveyor_name | surveyorname | Surveyor Name | minimal | |
select_one property | property | Property | minimal | |
geoshape | quadrat | Quadrat | press-to-locate | |
begin repeat | pestsurvey | Invasive Species Surveys | 8 | |
select_one species | species | Species | minimal | |
text | notes | Notes | ||
geopoint | surveylocation | Survey Location | hidden | |
image | photo | Photo | ||
end repeat |
So what have we done here and how is this survey intended to be used?
Now what gets created in our web portal when we publish this survey?
The Feature Layer will be a 'group layer', in which there is a polygon feature class and a point feature class. If we add this group feature layer to a web map and query the polygons, then the points will appear under related records because they exist in a related table, defined by the 'repeat' in the survey form.
Lastly, if we want our users to be able to go back and add new point surveys to the same polygon, then we would want to take advantage of either the 'Sent' folder or the 'Inbox' folder. You can read more about both of these options here: Prepare for editing existing survey data
Essentially, if we only want field workers to be able to edit and re-submit their own data, then we would let them use the 'Sent' folder (enabled by default at time of publishing). However if we wanted to enable users to modify and edit other field workers' submissions, then we would enable the 'Inbox' folder, found on the 'Options' tab when previewing your survey in Survey123 Connect.
Two other popular columns to investigate when starting out with Survey123 are:
Please explore these columns and all previously mentioned steps in the attached XLSForm (Quadrat and Pest Species Survey.xlsx)
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.