Time Entry on a Laptop Field app

[AdamInglis1]

Is it possible to change the date/time entry experience for users on a laptop?  My field guys are complaining that it takes too long to scroll through Time GUI and they'd prefer to have just a text field and manually type in the time.  Do I need to change all my time fields to text, or can just adjust the appearance somehow?

[ChelseaRozek]

Are you using the Web Designer or Survey123 Connect?

[AdamInglis1]

Connect v3.5.152.  I changed the fields from time to text, but the I was warned that this would delete old data if I published, so I published a new version.  From what I read time values are store as text, not dates, so I was hoping change the fields from time to text would to overwrite existing data.

[ChelseaRozek]

I usually like to change the default value of a datetime field to now() to catch when they're filling out the survey. That may not apply in your situation. There are a couple ways to help keep the text datetime standardized.

A regular expression in the constraint column: regex(.,'^\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{2,4}\s\d{1,2}\:\d{2}\s[ap]m$') to enforce 6/25/2019 10:50 am

I had some issues with regular expressions in the Early Adopter version, which it looks like you're on, so I went back to the latest public release.

or using an input mask in the body::esri:inputMask column like 99/99/9999 99:99 AA which gives you some guides as you type (see below)

[AdamInglis1]

The problem my field crews are having is the our forms have dozens of time fields that they are filling out on laptops.  They would prefer to tab between fields and type in the time instead of using the GUI time selector.  I was hoping that there was a way to disable that for laptop users so that mobile device users would still be able to use the GUI time entry.

[ChelseaRozek]

Unfortunately I haven't seen any way to change that GUI, it seems inherent to the data type. Text fields would be your best bet, like you're doing, with regular expressions, input masks, and/or calculations to ease the pain where possible.

[Shwu-jingJeng · Accepted solution]

Hi Adam,

We do have an issue logged to support the keyboard entry for time field, but do not have a specific timeframe for this issue yet. I had included your post to the issue to keep tracking this feature.