[Updated Dec 18]
One more update to Survey123 to close out the year! A day like today in 1901 Walt Disney was born. Good opportunity to remember him!
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book... Walter Elias Disney was a visionary. He brought animated cartoons to the next level, introducing new techniques, modernizing classic fairy tales and synchronizing music with his creations. He truly transformed a marginal form of communication into an entire new industry. Nobody has won more Oscars (22) or being nominated so many times (59). A pioneer of the American animation industry.
The 3.7 release is now available across all supported platforms. You can download this update from the iOS and Google Play stores or from our Survey123 Resources page. The build numbers are 3.7.55 for the field app and 3.7.59 for Connect. The Survey123 web app has also been updated.
This is a minor, yet important update, as it brings a handful of critical enhancements and fixes.
A lot of work in this update went into making sure you can work with the Inbox more reliably, faster and with many more records. The Survey123 field app Inbox allows you to update existing GIS records. If you are not familiar with the Inbox, I suggest you take a quick look at this video:
For more details, see the Prepare for editing existing survey data—Survey123 for ArcGIS | Documentation help topic.
With this release, the performance of the Inbox has been greatly improved, allowing you to more quickly download records onto your device; twice as fast as before! The Inbox can also now handle many more features. With this update you will be able to comfortably work with a few thousand records in your Inbox, even if you are downloading complex lines, polygons or have many related records. Overall, the Inbox is now much faster and less memory intensive. You will note a great improvement making this feature more reliable, particularly on low-end devices.
Based on our own tests, we can define an upper limit for the Inbox around ~40k (for points) and ~8k (for lines or polygons). Having said this, the intended and practical limit of the Inbox is lower; around a few thousand records. The philosophy of the Inbox is that of a 'to do' list where you can download surveys for field-users to process. For example, in an asset inspection workflow, each of the records in the Inbox, would represent an inspection for the end user to complete. You will not want to have the Inbox populated with every asset you have. Instead, you will want to use a filter to have the Inbox show only assets where inspections are due. You can apply Inbox queries using the username of the logged in user to tailor the Inbox contents for every person in your field crew. For the benefit of field users, try to keep your Inbox light, only showing records to be processed. Stay away from using the Inbox to download every record in your dataset, particularly if you have many tens of thousands of records.
Work with the numbers and calculator appearances was initially triggered by data-loss issues reported through GeoNet (Using Numbers Appearance Type Sometimes Will Not Store Value in Field). We addressed this issue and also took our time to revisit the usability of these controls.
The numbers and calculator XLSForm appearances are designed to accelerate data capture, providing specialized keypads that replace the generic screen keyboard provided by the operating system in your device.
As their names suggest, the numbers appearance will show a numeric keypad, and the calculator appearance will show... you guessed it: a calculator. These specialized keypads are also shown close to the question on which the data will be entered, as opposed to the bottom of the screen. This allows for faster data entry.
Throughout this release we performed many usability tests in various representative forms and against multiple form factors and devices. We refined the look, feel and behavior of these keypads with a focus on making data capture more efficient and intuitive. If you have used these keypads in the past, you will notice a noticeable improvement. If you are new to them, you may want to give them a go!
You can use the numbers and calculator appearances with integer, decimal and text questions. To learn more, see the Appearance—Survey123 for ArcGIS | Documentation help topic.
With this update we are adding support for Geode sub-meter GNSS receivers from Esri Partner Juniper Systems. The Geode receiver is compatible with Windows, iOS and Android devices. You can learn more about how to connect the Survey123 field app to an external GNSS receiver through Marika's https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2019/03/05/direct-gnss-external-receiver-support-in... blog post. On top of support for Geode, Survey123 also works nicely with the Juniper Systems Mesa 2 rugged tablet (available with either Android or Windows operating systems).
External GNSS receivers, such Geode, allow you capture sub-meter accuracy location data. Additionally, using XLSForm expressions you can easily use location metadata from the device to power data validation rules as well as to simply store the metadata for further analysis in the back-office.
Check out the https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2019/05/01/survey123-tricks-of-the-trade-xlsforms-a... blog post or https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2016/11/03/extracting-information-from-geopoint-que... to get the best out of your Geode with the Survey123 field app.
This update includes a lot more other good fixes and enhancements. I wanted to briefly highlight a few:
Fixes to Survey123 web forms apply to newly published surveys. If you have an existing web form already published and want to benefit from these fixes, you can re-publish your form.
BUG-000116741 Survey123 Field App looks like it's frozen when refreshing Inbox with many records (more than 1000).
We have a number of new features and enhancements lined up for upcoming releases. If you want to know more about them, join our Survey123 Early Adopter Community (EAC). You will find documentation about on-going work, forums for your feedback and of course, the Beta software.
Available for testing now through EAC:
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