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Survey not displaying correctly in browser on smartphone

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09-14-2023 07:43 AM
GregKeith
Frequent Contributor

I created a public survey in Survey123 Connect for an organizational event, using the smartphone form factor and published to our AGOL account. I set sharing to Everyone for all the elements and the survey.

Looks great in Connect. Looks bad in a smartphone web browser. Tried Safari and Firefox. Page jumps don't work (no arrows, but a Next button works), sliders/likert scales not displaying properly, etc. I also get some error that doesn't show the whole error message when opening from a QR code. Colleague having similar issues with same type of survey. Both are set to pages in Settings, his also uses grids. Any ideas what's wrong? xlsx form attached. Thanks.

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abureaux
MVP Frequent Contributor

The preview setting in Connect (see below) doesn't really do anything. That is purely there so you can get a general approximation of what a survey will look like on that sized screen. Connect displays what you will see in the S123 Field App, NOT a web browser.

abureaux_0-1694712714309.png

Web browser's have different navigation displays and other limitations - this isn't something you can change. If you are unfamiliar with these limitations, it may be easier for you to design the form in the web interface. You can go to the Surveys Site and click + New survey to design a survey in the web interface.

abureaux_1-1694712885055.png

Honestly, I never use this web interface to build a survey even if I am making a web specific form, so I can't give you any tips on actually building the form there. But I know some other users prefer this interface, especially when they are doing web-only surveys.

 

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abureaux
MVP Frequent Contributor

The preview setting in Connect (see below) doesn't really do anything. That is purely there so you can get a general approximation of what a survey will look like on that sized screen. Connect displays what you will see in the S123 Field App, NOT a web browser.

abureaux_0-1694712714309.png

Web browser's have different navigation displays and other limitations - this isn't something you can change. If you are unfamiliar with these limitations, it may be easier for you to design the form in the web interface. You can go to the Surveys Site and click + New survey to design a survey in the web interface.

abureaux_1-1694712885055.png

Honestly, I never use this web interface to build a survey even if I am making a web specific form, so I can't give you any tips on actually building the form there. But I know some other users prefer this interface, especially when they are doing web-only surveys.

 

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GregKeith
Frequent Contributor

Thanks. That's what my co-worker ended up doing with his survey. Eventually got mine to work, but had to delete a bunch of Connect functionality. Looked at the web designer, but it can't do (or I couldn't figure out) things like getting a value from a dropdown list to use in another question.

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konstakuorikoski
Occasional Contributor

I know this is late, but stumbling a lot of good questions and found limitations of Connect. This being one of them.

 

You can preview it in browser too. This is behind multiple steps, so I recommend only using it to finalize design and tweaking settings. You can open survey from website, where you see all your surveys. Note that if you start survey creation in Connect, you need to publish it in order to view it here. Same goes the other way around if you want to start designing in web designer, it becomes available to Connect only after publishing. But Publish is very confusing way to describe whats happening as its not shared and is only available to you and the admins of your organization. So essentially its still private. Once survey has been published, you can open it to browser with the chainlink icon that appears when hovering over the icon:

konstakuorikoski_0-1711613153338.png

In order to update survey from XLSForm to web view, you first need to save XLSForm, allow Connect to update survey, publish it (allowing any major changes) and then refreshing the browser view.

Simple and quite doable alternative function would be to allow Connect to launch browser and view local files in browser. Many website authoring tools have this functionality if they don't have imbedded web rendering.

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