Latest Contributions by MarikaVertzonis

Star Wars Day Update (May) “May the Fourth be with you” is a pun first used by Margaret Thatcher’s administration in an advertisement celebrating her election victory. While nothing Star Wars has ever actually been released on the fourth, almost every single Star Wars movie was first released in May; The Force Awakens is the only one so far that wasn’t. This update contains a lot of behind the scenes work to make the entire Survey123 process run better, as well as a few new features to help in gathering data. Survey123.arcgis.com Log into http://survey123.arcgis.com to discover an improved look and feel of the Survey123 management console. The survey gallery now shows the number of features submitted to each of your surveys, and the live reporting capabilities have been very much improved with better charts and mapping capabilities. You will also notice that the performance of the web site is significantly better when working with very large surveys (surveys have been tested with over half a million points!). Important Note: Clear your browser cache before you try the new web site. Publishing improvements Coming up with a good survey is often achieved after some trial and error. Up until this release, the feature service associated with your survey had to be re-created every time you made a change in your survey. We did this to ensure your feature service and its survey were all in sync, but the price you had to pay is that any data captured already in that feature service would be lost. Starting with this release, Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS will be much more forgiving: At publishing time, Connect will only recreate your feature service when absolutely needed. Here are changes in your survey that you will be able to push without having to re-create your feature service: Changing any of the Settings of your survey including: its thumbnail, title, summary, description, style, map properties or the image size setting Changing values in any of the following columns in your XLS file: Label, Constraint, Calculation, Default, Relevant, Language, Image, Audio, Appearance or Required Deleting questions or choices in lists The following changes will force Connect to recreate your feature service: Adding new questions or repeats Changing values in the Name, Type, EsriFieldLength or EsriFieldType columns in your XLS file If you want to learn more details about this, check out this help topic. You will also notice that in the field app, you no longer need to delete old versions of your surveys before you download a new one: simply go into the survey download page and refresh your survey! Working with existing feature services Survey123 now supports submission_urls, allowing you to link to a valid, preexisting feature service. This field can be defined in the Settings tab of your XLS file and it is pretty handy when you want to collect surveys for an existing ArcGIS for Server feature service. This is a pretty advanced feature, requiring you to fully understand how to build surveys that are compatible with your existing feature services. When a submission_url is used, Survey123 Connect will never validate if your survey questions have corresponding columns in the feature service. Averaging enabled on geopoint questions Capturing a location with a single position is all well and good, but we wanted to do better. Geopoint questions now have support for averaging a series of positions into one single location. To capture your current location, tap the location button in top right hand corner of the location panel.   To start capturing a location built from an average of positions, tap and hold the location button in top right hand corner of location panel. You will see the message appear ‘Averaged 1 of 1 positions (1 second)’. To stop averaging, tap the location button again. To delete this location and start capturing a new one, tap the location button a third time. If you press the form completion button whilst averaging is happening, you will cancel the current location calculation and the previous location collected will be used. Positional accuracy threshold Using the new body::accuracyThreshold column title in your XLS file, you can help field users capture more accurate data. The value in this column is expressed in meters. If the device used to capture a position is reporting a positional accuracy that is less than the threshold, then the user will see the geopoint panel be shown in red and include a warning message. Once the positional accuracy is better than the threshold, the title area will go back to normal. Note that the warning does not prohibit you from capturing a location.   If averaging positions as described above, any position beyond the threshold will not be used in the location calculation. Better Repeats Questions inside a repeat can now contain constraints, calculations and required fields. In the following form, multiple values and connections on a pipeline can be surveyed. The ID of each fitting is calculated to incorporate the pipe ID, and many fields are required.   This should not be news to you, but using multiple repeats within a survey is supported as long as you do not nest them. That is, as long as you do not include a repeat, within another repeat. Default values are not yet supported within repeats, but will come in a future release. Other enhancements Barcode questions now have a minimal appearance option. We will shortly publish a new blog post with more details about this. Bugs have been fixed in the implementation of several questions. Integers will no longer overflow, while decimal fields will no longer take invalid characters. Display bugs have been fixed with time fields with single-digit minute readings, and select one questions now play nice with text scaling. Sign-in and authentication has been improved, with Okta now supported. The user can now rename, rotate and delete photos from the Survey123 field app. Improvements have been made to photo browsing and selection. (iOS and Android) Online help Our documentation has been constantly improving, and now has a quick reference guide for the Survey123 app and website. The tutorials have also been expanded to provide more step by step details to follow, with a number of other pages also being updated with new information. Download Survey123 Connect (1.4.30) and the field app (1.4.28) now from http://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/download/​ Enjoy! ... View more

Despite popular belief, International Women’s Day doesn’t commemorate the anniversary of any specific protest, strike, or march. First officially observed in 1914, the date was chosen in honor of a number of significant events in women’s’ rights around that time over the five years previous. Speaking of significant events, we are so excited to introduce our latest update.  This one in particular goes to: Pam Bond, Marie-Lu Labuschange, Travis Butcher, Dustin Toy, RooPit, Carmel Connolly, Eamonn Doyle, Steven Thadius, Eric VanPraag, Scott Moore, Sonoma Land Trust, Daniel Hirner, Jeff Orton, Ronald Knepper and Mike Ruth. Tip: To quickly see some of the new features we describe in this post, download this sample XLS file and preview it in Connect. Date, time and dateTime questions Many of you wanted us to improve the calendar widget because before it was difficult to navigate, particularly when you wanted to pick dates far back in time. For example a birth date. The new calendar widget allows you to quickly change the year, month and date. You can simply tap on the arrows, or if you prefer you can tap and hold to navigate in time more quickly.  You will also notice that the calendar now looks much better in small devices. The weekdays and month dates are much more legible. When using date or dateTime questions you can also pick the year and month-year appearances. Use year if all you want is for users to pick a year: The month-year appearance looks like this. Again, either tap once or tap and hold to navigate the years and months back and forth.  You will notice that the new appearances are only present in the new XLSForm templates. Tip: If you have already authored a Survey, do not expect these new appearances to show in Microsoft Excel: you will need to create a new Survey to get these new appearances in the drop-down list in Excel. You will also notice a new user experience for defining time. Time can be set when you use either time or dateTime types of questions. Tip: It is sometimes useful to initialize the date and time controls with the current date and time respectively. You can do so by typing Now() or Today() in the default column of your date, dateTime or time type of questions. Likert and distress appearances A likert scale is a rating scale that allows respondents to specify their level of agreement on a symmetrical agree-disagree scale of a statement. The scale is designed to capture the intensity of their feeling for a given item. Likert items should be: Symmetrical - They should contain equal numbers of positive and negative positions that are symmetrical around a neutral or zero position (whether or not the zero position is select-able on the scale). Balanced - The distance between each value is the same. Some examples of typical 5 level likert items are as follows: The likert appearance only applies to select_one type of questions. Tip: Likert looks very nice in your desktop as well as on tablets, but be aware that the size of screens in phones can quite adversely affect likert.  If you want your survey to look right on phones, you will not want to add many choices, and keep your labels short.  It will take a bit of trial and error to get this right. The distress appearance applies only to integer type of questions and will limit user input values to a scale of 0 to 10. The color scale uses green to indicate good and red to indicate bad. This scale can be used to measure feelings, such as stress, happiness, pain and exertion. Create a distress widget in your survey by changing the appearance of an integer question to distress. For a list of all appearances that can be used in Survey123 see http://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/create-surveys/xlsformsappearance.htm​. Documentation Our first release of documentation is here: http://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123  For now, it is only available in English. Portal for ArcGIS A number of issues were addressed specific to Portal for ArcGIS. Website improvements The website at http://survey123.arcgis.com now lets you look at the results of your surveys in map and table view. The summary tab also includes charts that aggregate responses to your questions. The issues some of you experiences while attempting to share or download data should be resolved with new Surveys you publish. Performance In our previous update we gave survey loading times a good boost, but we left behind a couple of things that we are including in this release.  Very long lists in select questions now load faster, particularly if you use the minimal appearance. We also added a handy performance counter in Connect that will let you know how much time your Survey takes to load. This will help you validate if specific changes in your survey dramatically improve or penalize the loading times. Barcode support (use at your own risk) Barcode support has been introduced in this release. You will see this new question type in the new Excel templates and Connect and the App will work with it, but we are not entirely happy with the behavior yet. We know some of you want this feature badly, so we did not want to hide our progress, but be warned that this is still a work in progress. Input masks (use at your own risk) Input masks have also been introduced in this release. Input masks are used for two purposes. First they will help you format the user input, so it is more legible, but without forcing the user to focus on details such as separators. For example, when recording a time amount of 1 hour and 20 minutes, using an input mask of 99:99 would mean the user could type just the numbers 0120 and the time amount would be displayed as 01:20. Second, input masks can help you validate the input. In the example above, your input mask will ensure that all input from the user is limited to 4 numbers.  In an input mask, a value of 9 forces the user to type a number. A value of 99 forces you to type two numbers etc. For additional details refer to Custom esri columns. Time, currency and scientific values are ideal for input masks. The inclusion of currency symbols, time separators and decimal separators can give the user assistance with what to enter. Tip: Microsoft Excel can get picky when you type certain special characters at the beginning off your input mask. For example, Excel will not like this: $99.99.  This is because the dollar sign has a especial meaning to Excel and it will try to be smart about it. If you need to add a dollar sign in front in your input mask, make sure you add an extra character such as a comma ‘. Excel will ignore your comma and let you do what you want. We have found input masks to work better in iOS than in some Android devices. We are working towards improving the implementation so we ask for your patience. Input masks are used on string expressions only. The following shows an example that uses input mask to assist someone filling in a water sampling record. In this form: The users name is forced to start with a capital letter, followed only by lower case letters The site id number is constrained to a specific format of upper case letters The pH values are constrained to start with only 0 or 1 and include 2 decimal places The time value is formatted as hh:mm ... View more