Survey123 Workflow to Support Adding, Updating, and Removing Records

[Tiff-Maps]

Hello! Question here thinking through migrating my organization's Google Forms into Survey123. There is geocoding involved and essentially three components -- We want survey respondents to be able to:

1. Add new records with all the required information, and an Approved/Reviewed field that I will then have to approve before it shows publicly.

2. Request the removal of record(s) that would require them to be able to point towards a particular feature (likely based on the name) and not be able to delete it directly, but again I would have to review and remove/update as needed.

3. Be able to request updating information - which could be complicated as we would not allow overwriting or editing fields directly. This could be done through creating a new feature where I then reconcile the information, but would not be ideal due to it being both time- and credit-consuming. 

Can someone point me towards the right direction or help provide information to start mapping out a good workflow for this? Would all of these components possibly be part of the same survey with conditional questions? Or is it best done another way?

Thanks so much!

[BarbaraWebster1]

Hi @Tiff-Maps,

See below for a few ideas:

1. The approved/reviewed field could be handled in a couple ways.
   
   
   • One way is to configure two surveys to work with the same feature layer. One survey would be the main data input survey and the other would be the reviewer survey that would include all the fields from the first survey plus the review fields. 
     
     
   • Another way would be to toggle the visibility of the review question based on the currently signed in username. Here’s a link to an article that has more details on that approach.  
     
     Note that this article suggests using the relevant column to control whether the review question is accessible. If you are intending to use this survey to edit existing records, you will probably want to use the body::esri:visible column to control the visibility of the reviewer questions to avoid unintentionally clearing out any existing data. For more information of how the relevant vs. body::esri:visible columns work see this blog.
     
     
2. Request removal of a record – If you’re using the field app, you could enable the inbox and add a field for requesting removal. If you’re using the web app, you could embed a survey in a dashboard to allow the user to select a record from a map and then complete a field in the survey to request removal of the record.  
   
   
3. Support requesting updates to a record – There isn’t an out of the box solutions to this in Survey123, but using one or a combination of the approaches listed above may provide a solution to this.
   
   

- Barbara

[Tiff-Maps]

Hi, thank you so much! I don't think I saw this until now. Quick question on permissions and visibility based on the suggestions you provided - we would largely be collecting public submissions. Does this make those solutions less viable, since you mentioned signed in users?

I think your first bullet, and other suggestions, make a lot of sense! I will look into all of those options, thank you again!

[BarbaraWebster1]

@Tiff-Maps You should be able to configure the ideas above to work with public surveys. For example, you could have the submission survey be public and the reviewer surveys require sign in.

You may want to check out these blogs on working with public surveys and making sure the collected data is secure.

Getting Started with Public Surveys

Securing data in public surveys (Survey123 web designer)