Multiple repeats referencing the same table

[DuncanC]

I have two questions on this I'm hoping someone can help me with:

1) Is it possible to have multiple repeats in the same Survey use the same table?  For example I have a photos section that is a repeat that allows the capture of photos along with comments and some other data associated with that photo.  Is there a way to place it multiple places throughout a Survey and have them all tied to the same table?

2) Not my main question but related to that. Is it possible to have multiple surveys use the same table for their repeats?  In this example I'd like to use that photos repeat section on different surveys but have the data from both saved to / querying from the same table.

Thanks!

[abureaux]

1. Strictly speaking, no. (If you have a multi-page survey, you could just drop the photo repeat outside of the pages to have it accessible from every page)

2. Short answer, yes. (see https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-survey123-blog/working-with-existing-feature-services-in-arcgis...)

[ZacharySutherby · Accepted solution]

Hello @DuncanC, 

The first part of your question is not currently possible. I've logged the feedback for us to consider in the future. Would it be possible to elaborate a little more on your survey design and feature layer schema? 

You wouldn't want your photos repeat placed in any other repeats right it would only be against the survey's main or parent layer? 

For the second question you can have multiple surveys use the feature service. Surveys cannot use different feature services for submission endpoints, for example, you can't have survey submit to a layer/table in feature service A as well as a layer/table in feature service B. All layers and tables used by the survey for submission need to be in the same feature service. 

[DuncanC]

Hi @ZacharySutherby,  Thanks for the quick reply and the information!

I expected that was currently the case but think both those ideas would be great additions.  It would save us from needing an intermediate processing step to take the ugly data structures I'm forced to created to achieve the desired field user UX and get the data into a structure that is nicer to work with and search.

In more detail our use involves capturing a lot of pictures, for each picture we need to also capture some associated data like comments ect. The form is long and involves the end user physically inspecting items that are spread across an area, having one photos repeat they have to go back and forth to either as a page on the same survey or as a separate survey slows down the data collection too much, it's important that the time this task takes is kept to a minimum.  So I have the same repeat I use as a photos element throughout as required which gets us the UI desired but I now have a dozen tables I'll have to python into something less ugly.

My current use does include using that element (repeat) within other repeats but if ESRI's first step implementing features that allowed this didn't allow that I'd still be very thankful for the improvement.  I could rework things to not need to or worse case would have 90% less of the situation to deal with.