Does moving the ownerFolder lose entries?

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09-05-2021 07:13 AM
VanessaSimps
Occasional Contributor III

Does anyone know if I will lose data that staff has collected in the field if I change the folder as suggested? I am thinking that the draft data only lives on the phone, but I really do t want to lose that information! Here is why I ask:

I made the mistake of moving the items to another folder w/o realizing the consequences. Staff started collecting data last week and have several surveys saved in draft on the or phones. If I change the ownerFolder ID to the correct folder in AGO, will staff then be able to send the surveys w/o issue?  

I tested changing the folder ID in a dummy survey, but it didn’t seem to work, maybe I’m missing something.
I am also looking at how to recover the draft surveys from the devices just in case.

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6 Replies
MichelleWilliamsERM
Occasional Contributor III

Let me see if I can help!
Are you saying that you changed the ownership of your survey? If so, you'll want to make sure the Features Layer and the Form has a group attached, and the group has the same people as the group from the previous owner's group. Once this is fixed, your inspectors should be able to send their outboxes.
#JustBreath The scariest part of SURVEY123 is when it breaks, and you don't know how to fix it. I've made many mistakes, and the beautiful people here helped me. You'll find out who the superheroes are; you'll see their names on many of the answered posts. Enjoy learning, it's a long process, but you'll get there, and then you'll make new mistakes.

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DougBrowning
MVP Esteemed Contributor

Moving folders will stop you from publishing but should not stop anyone from submitting.  For submitting the app uses the Item ID not the folder names.  Just testing this for a migration project last week.  Moved owners whiles users had drafts and outbox no prob.  If your Item ID changed then you did something else also.

And yes for sure never move things in Esri land.

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VanessaSimps
Occasional Contributor III

@DougBrowning and @MichelleWilliamsERM  thank you both for the response. Let me clarify.

I am not having an issue publishing, it's just that my end users can't submit a survey. I did not change the ownership of the survey items (the ownerFolder ID has to do with the default folder ID vs the folder ID where I moved the survey to as I was trying to tidy things up in  my Contents in AGO). 

I also shared the S123 items to a group that my end users are a part of. It appears that the group gives the end users access to the items, but I think because it is a collaborative group, Survey123 isn't happy about letting anyone submit a survey (I can't pick the collaborative group from the Survey123 "Who can submit to this survey?" section. I am going to test to see if I create a new, non-collaborative group and add it in Survey123 if this fixes things.

Example: 

VanessaSimps_0-1631026793437.png

 

I am not having an issue publishing, it's just that my end users can't submit a survey.

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DougBrowning
MVP Esteemed Contributor

Have they ever been able to submit?  Are your users at least Editor level?  I think they also need to be a Field User type.  

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VanessaSimps
Occasional Contributor III

yes, staff is at the Creator Role and User Type. They submitted in our test runs, but that was before I shuffled things around in an effort to be tidy in my content page of AGO. Lesson, don't be tidy. 

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VanessaSimps
Occasional Contributor III

Good news! Once I adjusted the end users to be in a group that Survey123 could see (it won't see a collaborative group, fyi), I was able to send the surveys that were in the outbox successfully. I was extremely worried that adjusting the group sharing was going to cause the survey to need updating on the device and therefore force staff to lose anything in their Survey's outbox.  We didn't refresh the survey, until the following steps were completed:  

  • I did do a quick back up of the sqllite database from the iPad using these instructions. I only saved this sqllite database in case the next step failed. It is good to know I can get to the stored data on the mobile device if needed!
  • I then attempted to send the surveys in from the outbox. This was was successful, much to my relief!
  • Once the data was sent and showing up as record in the Survey, I did an export from s123 to a fgdb to create one more back up of the data, just in case! 

Huge relief that everything was transferred off the device successfully, staff had put in 40+ hours of difficult field work to collect the data and I was so worried we were going to lose it all! 

 

I hope these steps are helpful to someone else should they make the same "oops" as I did!

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