Asset Inventory in Survey 123

[mshanaghan]

I have an enterprise geodatabase feature service of assets called "Property Assets". This feature layer contains fields for manufacturer, model, cost, serial number, location, etc.

The physical assets have Code39 barcodes on them. These barcodes are also contained in the feature service in a field called "GIS Tag Number". 

I want to begin to inventory these assets using Survey 123. Is it best practice to keep the Property Assets feature service separate from the hosted feature layer created by the Survey 123 form and link them via a relationship class? If so, is it even possible to create a relationship between an enterprise feature service and a hosted feature layer? Or would I have to create the related survey table in the enterprise geodatabase?

Any advice is appreciated. Thank you. 

[RPGIS · Accepted solution]

Hi @mshanaghan,

So in regards to both hosted and enterprise services, typically you would want to keep everything in either one or the other.

Survey123 can be used to update information and write back to a published service from an enterprise sde database but that is bit of a tricky work around and isn't necessarily ideal.

If you want to update a hosted service and create the relationships that way then that is probably more ideal when using Survey123. Otherwise it might be best to create the relationship in the feature service published from the enterprise sde database.

There are some workarounds to getting information from bar codes in field maps.

[mshanaghan]

Thank you for this.

Upon further thought, I don't think a feature layer and related table of inspections makes sense for my use case. I want to use Survey 123 to update the published "Property Assets" feature service.

Ideally, field workers would open their camera, scan a barcode, and be taken to a Survey 123 form that contains all of the attributes of that asset from the published feature service.  The field worker would then edit those attributes in Survey 123 and submit the form to update the feature service. Is this achievable through Survey 123?

[RPGIS · Accepted solution]

Hi @mshanaghan,

You can do it but I believe there is a slight configuration issue between an editable enterprise fs vs a hosted service. The problem mainly stems from the configuration of the service itself which might prevent it from being updated.

Here is the documentation pertaining to that.

Feature layer requirements—ArcGIS Survey123 | Documentation

There are two other things to consider depending on which direction you want to take.

Regarding enterprise feature services, it is typically ideal to use Field Maps since the underlying application code base is more compatible with those types of services when compared to Survey123.

Survey123 on the other hand has more capabilities and intricacies than field maps, allowing users to customize the applications behavior extensively, which most people would understand by now.

However, one thing to consider at least in regard to enterprise feature services, is the use of attribute rules in conjunction with SQL to automate a majority of workflows. That is how we have our inspections set up which has reduced the time it takes to fill out information while automating a lot of our reports.

[mshanaghan]

Thank you for your thorough response. Those are important considerations.

My original plan was to use Field Maps for this project. Based on my research and testing, it seems like Field Maps is better than Survey 123 for editing existing data. However, my field workers are accustomed to scanning the barcode of an asset to bring up the form for that asset. They will NOT be on board with zooming and panning on a tiny screen to find one dot among thousands of others.

Until today, I thought that's what they would have to do in Field Maps. But I was wrong. It turns out that you can configure the web map in your Field Maps app to be searchable by a layer, by your barcode field specifically, and there is a barcode scanner button! 

Knowing this, I will probably switch to a single feature layer edited primarily in Field Maps rather than the Survey 123 related table route.

The remaining challenge will be how to handle geometry changes. My university has implemented ArcGIS Indoors and we want to associate these data with a facility, level, and unit. Ideally, I would set up attribute rules to calculate these fields based on point in polygon calculations, but I've found the floor switching to be cumbersome in Field Maps. 

[RPGIS]

So that is a fairly simple and straightforward method but it does have a strange workaround. Basically you would simply need to set a pre filtered field to only show the actively edited features. If you need further guidance in pretty sure others in the community have also handled this as well.