When will Survey123 support polylines and polygons?

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11-27-2018 03:36 PM
TiffanySprague
New Contributor III

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.

21 Replies
KimCoburn
New Contributor II

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:

  • Publish surveys that use lines or polygons as the geometry type
  • Capture line or polygon features by digitizing them on the map and use them as the geometry of the submitted survey
  • Publish a survey against an existing line or polygon feature services

There are many reasons why you might want to work with lines or polygons (instead of points), but here are some examples:

  • Capturing the portion of a river surveyed for environmental issues (geotrace)
  • Capturing the location and length of a transect line and recording the species seen (geotrace)
  • Capturing the extent of damage caused by a flood or fire, together with other key attributes (geoshape)

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:

  • Publish XLSForms with geotrace and geoshape question types
  • Publish surveys on top of existing polygon and polyline feature layer

Survey123 Field App:

  • Capture line and polygon features by freehand sketching
  • Capture line and polygon features by vertex by vertex capture
  • Edit line and polygon features by moving, adding or deleting vertices
  • Accurately positioning vertices by GPS location, coordinate, place or address.

Survey123 Website:

  • Explore and Filter captured records  using the Data and Analyze tab
  • Create custom reports on top of polygon and polyline surveys
  • Test webhooks
AdrianWelsh
MVP Honored Contributor

Thanks for sharing Kim! This changes everything!

Yay!   

KimCoburn
New Contributor II

Agreed! I have been looking forward to this for years and only been using way too complicated collector links in the interim. 

DougBrowning
MVP Esteemed Contributor

Anyone know if there is pulldata support for pulling vertexes, centroids, etc?  Can't seem to get it.

Thanks

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by Anonymous User
Not applicable

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.

NathanDulfon
New Contributor III

Thank you sir!

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smukahhal
New Contributor II

Is there a way to calculate the area of the polygon in Survey123 and show it in form ? like a calculation field ? 

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JamesTedrick
Esri Esteemed Contributor

Hi Sulaiman,

As this is a beta feature, the Early Adopter Community is the more appropriate place to ask a question on this.  

smukahhal
New Contributor II

Thanks and I totally agree, I just follow the link from my mail and I though i was in the Early Adopter Community Form. 

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RobertThomas2
Occasional Contributor

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.

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