Is there any solid information about when Survey123 will accommodate polylines and polygons? It always seems to be "soon" or "high on the list", but with no dates. We use S123 and like it very much, but the inability to capture tracks may force us to switch to Collector, which otherwise would be suboptimal for our work (field ecological research by a non-profit organization using citizen scientists). Thanks for any insight anyone can provide.
Did you guys see the new Survey 123 Beta!?!
Background
In line with popular demand, we are planning to introduce support for lines and polygons in the Survey123 Field app - I’m sure this is an existing prospect for many of you!
So, what does this mean? Essentially, in builds 3.3.28 of the Field App and 3.3.21 Connect, you will now be able to:
There are many reasons why you might want to work with lines or polygons (instead of points), but here are some examples:
Getting started
To get going, all you need to do is publish a survey that contains either a geotrace or geoshape question. FYI In XLSForm speak a geotrace is equivalent to a line question and geoshape is equivalent to a polygon question. Publishing a survey with one of these questions in it will result in feature service with a line/polygon geometry being created. Once the question is added to the survey, you will be able to tap on the question to open the map, and then start capturing feature's geometry.
Note that in your existing surveys these questions will throw an xls validation error (as these question types are not yet listed), but you can ignore the error and successfully publish your survey.
In this beta version of the app, we have added support for the following:
Survey123 Connect:
Survey123 Field App:
Survey123 Website:
Thanks for sharing Kim! This changes everything!
Yay!
Agreed! I have been looking forward to this for years and only been using way too complicated collector links in the interim.
Anyone know if there is pulldata support for pulling vertexes, centroids, etc? Can't seem to get it.
Thanks
Hi Doug,
Please keep an eye on the EAC announcements for updates to Survey123 beta and support for polyline and polygons, we will be adding support for calculations and other functions in near future.
Phil.
Thank you sir!
Is there a way to calculate the area of the polygon in Survey123 and show it in form ? like a calculation field ?
Hi Sulaiman,
As this is a beta feature, the Early Adopter Community is the more appropriate place to ask a question on this.
Thanks and I totally agree, I just follow the link from my mail and I though i was in the Early Adopter Community Form.
Keep in mind, the WGS 1984 Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere coordinate system (or projection) that is used in web mapping is a simplication of the shape of the earth and thus will yield bad data when the user attempts to do analysis, calculate length, calculate area, or even determine direction. It is NOT a conformal projection, which means it doesn’t even preserve the shape of items on the earth. It is basically a simplified projection that companies like Google, Bing and Esri are using in web browsers to make life easier for some. It allows for simpler tiling and faster display of imagery and other base data for web browsers and web mapping. Best practice is to download the data from AGOL and use in a projected map document and do calculations within ArcGIS.
NGA advisory notice for details about Web Mercator distortion slides from the ESRI UC 2015 presented by NGA after issuing their advisory notice in 2014. https://www.slideshare.net/NGA_GEOINT/ngas-position-on-webmercator
I hope this helps.