Adding photos in a repeat causing strange behavior in Survey

[AdamDaily]

I have a repeat for taking photos. The first photo takes when you hit the camera icon and I can see the picture in my survey. If I hit the "+" icon to add additional photos, the entire survey immediately resets back to the top. It clears all of my previously answered questions and hides the parts of the survey dependent on those questions being filled out. If I fill out the survey again, when I get back down to pictures my 1st photo is still there.

No idea what is happening here. I've seen this happen on android J7 and galaxy S5. It's also not consistent survey to survey or between the same model devices. Sometimes adding more photos works fine. Sometimes it erases all your data and resets the survey. Is there a known issue with the phones causing this? Or with repeats? I can't get any consistency replicating the problem so its hard to determine what is causing it. I don't want to send our field crews out with them thinking the app isn't working, and me not knowing how frequently this problem will occur.

[JohnathanHasthorpe]

Hi Adam

Happy to help you troubleshoot this. I know that you said that this is intermittent, but could you share your survey with me and I will see if I can replicate.

Thanks

John

[AdamDaily]

Survey attached. I have changed it around a bit in an attempt to find some format that works. Doesn't seem to matter where I put it. Originally the photos were at the end of the survey, now the beginning. Results after publishing are the same when I try to field collect data from a mobile device. As soon as I take a pic and hit "+" to add additional pictures my other fields are suddenly wiped clean of whatever data was in them

[AdamDaily]

John,

Just wondering if you had any ideas on what may be causing this or had a chance to look at the data. Is it a known issue, something in survey, or something with the make or model of phones being used?

[JohnathanHasthorpe]

Hi Adam 

I have tried your survey on a selection of devices and have not been able to replicate this behaviour.

Could you confirm what version of Survey123 you are using as well as the Android versions you are running?

Thanks

John

[AdamDaily]

That's good and bad news.

Survey version is 2.6.4

Samsung J7, Model: SM-J700T (primary model our field crews have - problem occuring consistently)

Samsung Galaxy S5, Model: SM-G900P (problem not totally consistent but occuring regularly)

Samsung Grand Model SM-G530T (best results of the 3, but still mixed results)

I had an unrelated issue with recalling sent survey data from the Outbox folder where loading a survey from outbox to edit triggers the survey to reload thus rerunning all calculate fields and thus resetting those fields as well as clearing any fields that are "relevant" on the results of those calculations. It seems something similar maybe happening here where the "+" add picture tool in survey triggers a reload/reset of the entire survey.

What devices were you able to successfully add multiple pictures with? If its a model issue or Samsung issue we may need to look at switching out our field crews mobile devices. Perhaps there is a phone setting that could be changed but I don't know what that would be?

[JohnathanHasthorpe]

Hi Adam - I tested on an IPhone 7 and a Samsung S6. Could you let me know the Android versions you are running. See see if I can test something more similar. The other thing to check is the storage on the devices - do you have much capacity available?

[AdamDaily]

I'm not sure as to the actual version that is on each phone, we have a lot of field crews and phones floating around between those who need one and the versions seem to change fairly regularly with updates. I do know we have tested on a number of android phones and this problem has remained consistent.

Interesting you mention storage though, I had 1 phone that was working fine with capturing repeat photos for about a month now, and then suddenly stopped working and started deleting data fields the way other phones were doing.

Perhaps there is something to that. I know the pictures are collected on the phone, but they are also stored within the sql db in AGOL correct? I'm interested to see if we delete all the photos from that phone that have been collected thus far, if the repeat function would work again.