Survey123 close and save changes to drafts failing

[AndrewRyan3]

We have been field testing a survey123 application, and our staff has noticed that the option to close the survey, and save as draft sometimes fails. This usually happens if a person has closed the survey already that day, and tries to close out again. However,  it isnt consistent. Sometimes it works just fine closing and saving several times in a row. When it fails, the survey form reopens without going to the main menu, and any changes you have made since the last time it was saved to drafts are gone.

My questions:

1. Is there a way to bring back these data from the autosave location?  I understand that Survey123 now auto saves after each question is entered, but is that data stored somewhere other than the draft folder dataset? As I understand it, when the error occurs, the data reverts back to the saved draft data, and the new data dissapears.
2. Could there be an issue with the file name in the drafts folder being the same with several saves? I have the survey name generate based on a site name and date, so if it is saved twice, the survey instance name would be the same. Would this confuse the software, or should it overwrite the draft folder dataset if the names are the same?

Details:

• The surveys are going to be for whole day workdays, so they could be open for 8 plus hours. I dont want to foprce the field staff to keep them open all day, and would like to let them close out of the survey if they need to.
• The survey has several repeats in it, and last time i tried it the inbox still wasn't pulling data in repeats back from the hosted services correctly. Because of this, i now have the inbox disabled, and only have staff submitting surveys at the end of the day. So I need the data on the device to stay saved and happy.

thank you for your help!

Andrew

[AndrewRyan3]

I thought we had this worked out, but my field crew just reported it happening again with up to date versions of the survey123 app. The form is up to date, and was published from an up to date survey123 connect. At Random times of the day the crew will go to save a draft and it will fail and all unsaved data will disappear. Our solution is to ask them to not save since the form already has autosave, but that doesn't fill our staff with a lot of confidence in the app.

[DanielKonzek]

  We have also experienced data loss when a survey has been submitted to AGOL.  This makes me skeptical that the autosave function is actually writing the data to a temp file at the frequency expected.  I have been trying to figure out where the autosave function saves the data?  It does not seem to write it to the sqllite file that is used when a survey is saved as a draft. 

  I republished my survey using Survey123 connect version 2.5 and data is being collected using version 2.5.  This has reduced the occurrence of data loss for all but one of my data collectors.  Using App studio, I have captured the data loss in a log file 3 different times and submitted to ESRI for review, but have not yet heard anything definitive back.  

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Dan,

The autosave should be triggering each time a value is set for most question types (geopoint is the exception).  It is saved in the file 'autosave.json' file in the 'ArcGIS/My Surveys/' folder- is that file not present?

[DanielKonzek]

In the folder 'ArcGIS/My Surveys/' I see:

• A folder for each of the surveys that I have created named by guid(?)
• A folder called 'Databases' that contains my sqllite database
• A folder called 'Maps'

I do not see an 'autosave.json' file and cannot find one when i perform a search.

[DanielKonzek]

The file is there now.  The file is only present when autosave is actively in use.  Once I opened a survey, added some data, and then closed survey123 - the autosave.json file was visible.  Once I submitted that same survey to AGOL the autosave file was gone.  Good to know.  

If my data collectors are experiencing data loss occasionally using the 'save as draft' function, would you recommend that we rely on autosave?  As mentioned above, our surveys take multiple days, so we need to be able to save data, reopen a survey, and continue working.  Our workflow would be to work for an hour, close survey123 (without saving), re-open survey123 and click on 'Continue Survey' when the 'Survey Recovered' screen appears.  Then at the end of the day, they can submit to AGOL.  Next day they would access that record using Inbox and begin collecting data.

Thanks again,

Dan

[JamesTedrick]

It sounds like that workflow would work.  It would be good if we can try to replicate the problem you are having with Drafts as well - it should be working without issue as well.

James

[DanielKonzek]

If you have time, I would welcome an opportunity to share my xls with you and/or the app studio log files that I have collected that capture the occurrence of the data loss.  

Dan

[Peters_Amy]

James,

I have field staff that are also experiencing the same Save to Drafts issue described in this blog.  The new data that is entered disappears and does not happen consistently every time, but happens enough that more than one person has reported this behavior. So, I have asked one surveyor to please test out the work flow where we rely on auto save instead of Save as Draft to see if that will be the best method until I can redesign the survey (the requirement to access a survey at a later time is going away since the project manager is requesting data be sent immediately after the field trip). I'll monitor this blog and post when I have an update.

[AmandaSandström2]

Hi James,

Our field staff has experienced the same problem with saving to draft. The problem only occurs for some of them though and I can't figure out why.

Best regards,

Amanda