Cofigure thousand separators

[MarcelBeckmann]

In a Survey123 created with the website I ask for the year. I used the field number and set a min and max Value. So now there is a hint that shows: Please enter a number between 1.960 and 2.023. 

And this looks horrible. I know there is the option to use Date and reduce it to just the year. Anyway this is no excuse to be not able to remove the thousand separators. What about IDs, postal codes, etc. All these number I do not want to show with a thousand separator. 

So please ESRI give the user the oportunity to configure if a thousdand seperator should be shown or not throughout the whole ESRI world in every App, WebMap, etc. 

And if you are fixing this. I think it would be a good idea to also be able to choose the decimal separator as well.

Thanks.

[Tim_Ultee]

Hi Marcel,

I'm actually coming from the opposite direction trying to add thousand separators for user-input fields.

That said, for your examples listed I think setting the field/question type to text would be the way to go for things like IDs, postal codes, etc. While they typically use numbers, you don't want to treat them as such because this would drop off leading zeroes important for the ID (ex: NJ postal codes usually start with 0). Because there is never a need to do number calculations with IDs or postal codes, using string/text is a better option.

As for dates, as you suggested I believe a formatted date field would be the way to go vs integer. As stated, just set the appearance field to "year". To constrain possible entries, use the constraint field:

https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-apply-a-constraint-on-a-date-question-in-arcgis....

[MarcelBeckmann]

Hello Tim,

thank you for your message. 

With the numbers field you have a point with the leading zeros. But what about sorting. If you define a field as text and you want to sort it you get something like this:

1
10
100
2
20
200

There is surely a way to fill it with leading zeros. But in my opinion, it is also not a very nice way. 

[Tim_Ultee]

Hi Marcel,

That is true, though I believe most postal codes and many IDs have a set number of digits, zeroes included.

Sorting numerically for fields that aren't truly "numeric" in logic probably isn't necessary in many cases. If it is though, you could always calculate another field and convert your string to an integer/double. Not ideal, but its an option.

I agree with your general premise regardless though. Giving us more flexibility to change the appearance of entries would be greatly appreciated. In my case, I want thousand separators but unfortunately this function isn't available at all in the Survey123 web app.

[MarcelBeckmann]

Hey Tim,

yeah, like everything in live everything has it advantages and disadvantages. 

I could argue that it is not only ids and postal codes and sometimes  people want to sort by these columns. And yes you are right, I could calculate another field. But this is a change in my data model but we are running an enterprise GIS with many replicas, etc. and here you do not really want to change your data model.  

Anyway something that I do not understand is that ESRI does not include throughout ALL their applications (All Apps, WebMaps, etc.) a checkbox where you can define a thousand seperator. It's these little things that would make their software so much better. 

Thank you for your inputs! Have a great day!