External Cascading Select Not Working

[SarahThompson1]

I'm using cascading selects to quickly filter down the choices for a room number/id for a building. Otherwise users will scroll through ~13,000 room ids.

-I can create a regular cascading select where the cascading select_one choices work great. However, I get an error 499/ gateway timeout when publishing because the choice list has over 10k values for the largest list series.

-When I convert it to an external cascading select, I can publish the survey, but the choices that are in the external_choices tab do not show up in the form. 

I scoured GeoNet, and found nearly the same question unanswered. See:

External Cascading Select Not Working  for an identical problem that is unresolved. (suggest solution: make unique column names that are not the same as list names. I tried that, no resolution)

and external select stopped working works for the questioner and though I tried it, it did not work. (suggested solution: ensure the label::language1 was set to label::English (en) on all forms)

Any ideas of how to solve this?

Update 9/16/2020.

After working with ESRI Support I have the following information:

The Choices sheet has an upper limit of 4837 items per list set. No known upper limit on External Choices.

Since the External Choices is stored as a CSV ensure the following.

   -There are no commas anywhere in the Label field (or anywhere else)

   -There are no Carriage Return (CR, ASCII code 13) or Line Feed (LF, ASCII code 10) characters in the Label field. Use 'Find and Replace' with 'Shift+J' to search for Carriage Return. Surveys viewed on a browser will work if there are multi-line characters, but Android and iOS devices will not.

   -My room ids are numbers as String, Excel will flag them with an error indicating 'numbers stored as text'. You must format them as text by clearing the cell error - Ignore Error or create a helper column with the =Text formula, then copy paste values over your original data. (Then delete your helper column)

   -Delete the Itemset.csv in [Show survey in folder]/Media folder. When you publish a new one will be created reflecting all the changes you made on External Choices sheet.

I have gotten my survey working!

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Sarah,

This seems like an issue that has come up with another customer.  Can you try moving all the choices that use choice_filter to the external choice column?

[SarahThompson1]

Yes, this is already the state of the form. As in, I already have all the

choices that use the choice_filter in the external choice tab.

There are three questions that use the choice filter starting with a select

one/choices question (this gives the first value for the choice filter for

the external choices). The count of external choices for each question is

238, 1799, and 13358 respectively. I use the choice filter to narrow down

the options for each survey form drop down based on the

preceding choice_filter.

[SarahThompson1 · Accepted solution]

For Anyone Else searching for the answer to this/similar problem and want to save time when asking GeoNet or Opening a Support Ticket to let them know this isn't the problem:

-Confirm there are no special characters in the any of the 'Name' columns in your tabs.

-Confirm you are using only select_one_external with choice filters for you external_choices tab

(From https://support.esri.com/en/Technical-Article/000021767) 

James suggestion above was where I started when I posted to this forum but gave me the idea to try NOT having all my choices with choice filter to the external tab. I moved the smallest list (with 239 choices) back to the regular choices tab. Et Viola the survey works! Note: my smallest list was also the first question to use a choice filter after a Begin Repeat.

Is it a fluke? Why does it work? Is 239 choices a "small" set and okay to stay in the choices tab vs external_choices tab where "large" sets need to go? Is it because the Select_on/choice filter is direct after a begin repeat instead of a preceding select_one that will populate the choice filter? I do not know. Wish I did so I and others can avoid this  glitch in the future. 

Good Luck Y'all