Is there a character limit placed on "text" type questions?

[EmilyBartee2]

I've made several surveys using Survey123 Connect and when it comes to filling out the surveys there seems to be a limit on the number of characters allowed (255) for the "text" type questions.  Is there a way to bypass this or increase the limit?  Is it a field that is defaulting on the XLS form spreadsheet or can I add it as a field to increase the limit?  We are using this for damage assessment purposes and the descriptions entered are often longer than 255 characters.  

[IsmaelChivite · Accepted solution]

Hi Emily Bartee​. By default, text questions use a default length of 255, but you can change that  using the bind::esriFieldLength column.  There is a discussion on this topic in our Survey123 Blog: Mapping XLSForm questions into ArcGIS Feature Service fields

If you plan to let users type long descriptions in a question of type text, you will also want to use the appearance column and set it to multiline. This will not change the length of your field, but will show a larger text input box in the survey.

Hope it helps,

Ismael

[HayleighPervorse1]

Hello,

Is there a way to change the default for the string length all together in survey 123? So when we create a new survey for example all the field lengths will default to a number we define (like 50), instead of 255? Otherwise we have to update the field length for each field which is very time consuming with our large surveys. And leaving the default of 255 is causing issue with our data in the web map.

Thanks,

Hayleigh

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Hayleigh,

There isn't a way to set the default string length in Survey123 Connect or the Web Designer (which is where this would be applicable during the form authoring process).

Can you describe how the default is causing issues in the web map?  255 is the default length used for a large number applications, so a problem would be seen in feature classes created by those applications as well.

[AdamBakiera]

I have a question that's sort of related to this. We have a survey published from a feature service and we need to increase character limits on a couple of fields. When I go to the feature service page in AGOL under the 'Data' tab, I can add fields and edit one or two things but I don't see an option to increase the field length. Is it possible to do this in AGOL or does this require editing the feature service itself? I would rather not do that because that requires re-publishing the feature service and thus losing our current records.

Thanks!