Latest Contributions by IsmaelChivite

St Kilda is a beachside suburb of Melbourne, Australia.  Among the various attractions in St Kilda is Luna Park, a theme park featuring the worlds oldest operating roller coaster. It is also known for its Sea Baths established in the19th century and of course, its beach, which is a popular summer spot for melbournites, tourists and backpackers.  My personal favorite at St Kilda is its pier, which holds a small colony of penguins.  There is only one place in the world where you can step out of a tram, walk down a pier and watch penguins, and that is St Kilda.   In late October, while giving the final touches to this release, the Survey123 team gathered in Melbourne for a one-week team meeting.  We enjoyed visiting the pier at night and watching the penguins as they swam around and hide between the rocks.   We thought we would be devote this update to the St Kilda penguins, so here you go... Overall, this update to Survey123 is mostly focuses on quality. We took our time going back through issues reported, sorting the most relevant and fixing them.   While fixes are a big part of this release, you will also find a handful of enhancements inspired by your feedback. Custom Themes in Web Designer With Survey123 Web Designer you can visually create smart forms, right from your web browser. Survey123 Web Designer grows with every release, incorporating new question types, validation rules and other improvements. Smart forms published with Survey123 Web Designer can be used from the Survey123 Field and Web Apps. With the introduction of custom themes, you can now tightly control the look and feel of your web surveys.  Below are some examples illustrating the type of things you can do. Header colors, page and survey backgrounds, the color of the submit button... all of that can be now set so you can more closely reflect the feel and brand identity of your own organization or project.  Custom Themes are of particular interest to those of you interested in publishing surveys for use over the web. The new themes are under the Appearance tab in Web Designer and can be applied to any survey authored in Web Designer. Custom Themes in Web Designer cannot be used with surveys published from Survey123 Connect. Check this blog post for more details: https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2018/11/01/introducing-custom-themes-in-survey123-web-designer  User Input Validation Rules in Multiple Choice questions (Web Designer) The validation section for Multiple Choice questions in Web Designer has been expanded so you can easily define the minimum and maximum number of choices that can be selected from the list. For example, you can now configure a Multiple Choice question so users will not be able to check more than 3 options, or at least 2, etc. Validation rules set in Web Designer will be honored by both the Survey123 Field and Web apps. More details around multiple choice questions can be found at:  https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2017/08/30/understanding-multiple-choice-questions-in-survey123-for-arcgis  Character counter in text questions (Web and Field app) Multi-line questions now display a character count, helping users keep track of how much text they can add before reaching the maximum limit set by the survey owner. The character counter is implemented in both the Survey123 Web and Field apps and can be set from Survey123 Web Designer as well as through Survey123 Connect. Dynamic Question Labels As of 3.1, you can include XLSForm variables within the label of a question or note.  In the example on the side, the Type of Violation and Offender Name entered by the user are embedded in the labels of questions in the survey. If used appropriately, Dynamic Question Labels will help you make questions in your survey more meaningful to end-users and facilitate navigation. For more details around dynamic labels refer to this blog post:  https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2018/11/01/understanding-dynamic-labels-in-survey123-for-arcgis  For a complete list of enhancements in the Survey123 Website, Field App and Connect, refer to the What is New Help topic. Main Fixes and Enhancements to Survey123 Website and Web App BUG-000116143 The Survey123 for ArcGIS website works slowly when generating a report and generates an error while downloading custom reports exceeding 10 MB in size. BUG-000112528 Custom Reports fail to load with an error indicating the parser failed to execute if a field it cannot read or does not exist has a formatting set. BUG-000116436 In Survey123 web Design, Rule Setting disappear when you log out if “Show” questions are in a Group. The settings, however, is still honored in the App or Web when submitting surveys. BUG-000116368 Getting error when trying to export to KML on Survey123 Portal website "Error executing function. failed to execute (export service). failed." BUG-000110646 When publishing a survey from Survey 123 for ArcGIS online website to Survey 123 connect for ArcGIS then publish the survey back to online the survey loses the background image BUG-000115084 When utilizing a choice filter in Survey123 for ArcGIS, if images are used against filtered questions, the label fails to display properly on the Data and Analyze tabs BUG-000113561 The Survey123 for ArcGIS web app does not allow user to enter decimal '.' values when using Dutch language in ArcGIS Online BUG-000114313 The survey background sets in Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS is not honored if the survey is accessed using web browser BUG-000114658 A publicly shared Survey123 survey hosted on a federated Portal for ArcGIS or ArcGIS Server is not accessible from a public ArcGIS Online web map when signed in to ArcGIS Online BUG-000115903 In Survey123 website, a question configured using pulldate ("@geopoint") does not get populated even when the Geopoint question is filled (reverse geocode) BUG-000115045 Surveys created in the survey123.arcgis.com website fails to open in the Safari browser of iOS devices, where the iOS version is below 11.0.0 Added support for the XLSForm version() function in the Survey123 Web App. ENH-000113657 Question visibility settings are now persisted across multiple sessions ENH-000105733: You can now apply filters to data displayed in the Analyze page Image questions in Web Forms now let users leverage the built-in camera or webcam attached to laptops and computers. Major architectural changes have been made in the Feature Report Service to accommodate user load and also to make the rendering of maps in your reports more robust.  Many of the map rendering issues that we have targeted are summarized in this GeoNet thread: Am I the only one having issues with Survey123 Reports?  We also have enhanced the error descriptions to help you debug report template syntax. Our goal is to move the Feature Report functionality into general release around May 2019. We greatly appreciate the feedback that all of you are providing, please keep your comments coming. Main Fixes and Enhancements to Survey123 Field App and Connect The build number for the Survey123 Field app is 3.1.158 and it is available for download in the App Stores and our  Survey123 for ArcGIS | ArcGIS Download page. The Survey123 Connect build is 3.1.126. Apple Transport Security supported on iOS. Two new appearances have been added: predictivetext  and nopredictivetext. They are meant to be used with text type of questions and allow the survey owner to enable or disable the predictive text functionality included with the Android and iOS operating systems. BUG-000105983: Survey123 Connect will hang while attempting to publish if the survey includes a repeat block with no questions in it. BUG-000110646 Website background images not maintained when survey republished in connect. BUG-000116622 An error message is thrown when submitting from Survey123 for ArcGIS if the survey contains a geopoint question within nested repeats Fixes for the autocomplete appearance: all xform formatting breaks when I place a calculation in a Select_one question.  Two CSVs in my media folder for the pull data functionality?  BUG-000106380 Default Value set in Survey123 Connect is not applied when survey includes cascading select and autocomplete BUG-000097421 In Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS, if a time field has a calculation all time field's defaults are ignored Fixes to repeat_count: How to put Count() and Once() in pulldata calculations?  repeat_count resulting in strikeout text showing in select_one dropdowns  BUG-000097613 using a calculation within a repeat creates a related record even if repeat count=0 BUG-000109478 - Strikethrough appears in select one inside a repeat, with repeat count applied Nested Repeats - Retrieval from Inbox (First record in a repeat using repeat_count value shows blank if open from the Inbox, Sent or Outbox). Survey123 surveys not showing in app despite being downloaded  BUG-000117394 "The INSERT statement has conflicted with the FOREIGN KEY constraint" error is thrown when Survey123 is pointing to an existing feature service that contains multiple tables all relating back to one parent layer Coordinates passed via custom_url through the center parameter are ignored Under certain conditions, map returns to current location after an address is entered in geosearch On certain iOS6 devices, taking a photo using the Survey123 built-in camera causes an application crash On iOS devices with auto-orientation locked down, images captured using the front-facing (selfie) camera are upside down when the phone is rotated in landscape mode BUG-000116932 When an image is set as a default value for an annotate question outside of a repeat in Survey123 for ArcGIS, the annotate option fails to appear. What is coming next Survey123 3.2 is already on the works and our plan is to make it available in January 2019 across all supported platforms.  Version 3.2 will focus on quality, addressing specific software defects that we could not accommodate into the 3.1 update. Through the Early Adopter Program, we regularly offer early cuts of the software, which you can use to test your existing surveys as well as new features on the works. The main new Early Adopter Program feature in the Survey123 Field App is support for direct connection to external GNSS receivers (scheduled to be generally available around March 2019.  We strongly encourage you to read the Early Adopter documentation, test the latest available builds and report your findings. ... View more

Using the Survey123 web designer, you can control many visual aspects of your online surveys.  This includes the look of your survey header, the style of its background, the alignment, color and size of text used in questions, the placement of logos, etc. Of course, all of this is important because people are expecting visually compelling surveys from you. Crafting surveys with great visual appeal is particularly critical for public surveys. By having good control over the look and feel, you will be able to more closely reflect the feel and brand identity of your own organization or project. Before we start, I want to emphasize that in good survey design, the looks are just half of the story. Carefully crafting the questions to be included in a survey, their order, wording, grouping and the best fit for the available question types, is the other half.  Trying to detail all of this at once would make a very lengthy post, so this time I will focus strictly on the visual aspects of surveys: the looks. Below you have a few examples illustrating different techniques to make your surveys shine: Custom banners, backgrounds, in-line photos and a few other tricks.      In this blog post, I will describe a handful of techniques to give your surveys a unique touch, making them look more professional.  While some of the features I am about to describe will be honored by the Survey123 field app, I will mostly focus on the design of web forms.  For a quick tour of custom themes, I highly recommend you watch this short video-tutorial. In just three minutes, it covers the most important aspects  of custom themes.     Basic Layout Elements: Header, Description and Footer   The basic elements around questions in your survey are the Header, Description and Footer.  Right from the Appearance tab, you can choose to show them, or hide them. For example, the Description element is typically used to describe what your survey is all about.  It is generally made out of text or a combination of text and images. If you feel like the title shown in your header is descriptive enough, you can choose to hide the Description element all together.     By simply clicking on the Header, Description and Footer in the design preview, their properties will be made editable in the right panel of Web Designer.   Survey Header   The header typically holds the title of your survey, but it is also a great location to display an organization logo.  You can choose a Text Header, for which you can control its background color and text alignment, or an Image Header.  If you choose an Image Header, your image will be adjusted so it fits the entire width of the survey, which will not be larger than 680 pixels. For this reason, as a general rule, your header images should not be wider than 680 pixels. The height will be set so your image aspect ratio is preserved. It is best to go with a wide image to avoid taking too much vertical space.  The header is taking the top most part of the display, so with such prime real estate on your screen, you do not need a big, tall header to make a point.     When selecting an image for your header, you can either reference an existing image through a URL or upload a new image. I either case, try use lightweight images or otherwise your survey will be slower to load. Survey Description   The Survey Description element, in Survey123 jargon, is a Note question type. Just like with the Survey Header, you can easily hide the Survey Description element from the Appearance tab.  To set the content of the Description, simply click on the element in the preview, and all the settings will appear in the right panel.     Note that the contents of the Description element accept rich text, so you can add entire paragraphs controlling the font color, size, text alignment, images, links, etc. This makes the Description very flexible, allowing you to provide context about the survey itself. To support recovery effort after hurricane Michael, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Florida State Emergency Response Team, published a public survey to help citizens report the location of debris.  Note how they used the Survey Header to include a simple form title, and then leveraged the Survey Description element to place their organization logos as well as a brief note about the purpose of the survey. The Survey Description element also included links referencing the organizations website and other relevant documents.     The Survey Description element is particularly critical for public web surveys where you cannot assume that people know what your survey is all about. A bit of context, is always good! Right below the Description element is where questions in your form will appear.  I will describe later how you can use Themes to control visual aspects of your questions, but for now, let's jump into the footer. Survey Footer   The Survey Footer sits at the very bottom of the survey. This is a good place to link back to your organization's website or solicit feedback. Similar to the Header and Description, you can choose to hide or show the footer from the Appearance tab, and you can edit its properties (text and URL link) by simply clicking on the Footer in the preview.  Look carefully at the animation to see how you can bring the window to edit Footer properties.     The URL for your footer does not need to necessarily be a URL to a website. You can also include a mailto link. For example, if your URL is set to mailto:[email protected] , you can help survey takers send you feedback to your email account. Survey Themes   Survey Themes help you easily define the color scheme of the most relevant visual aspects of your survey. A gallery of basic themes is included with Survey123.  Most themes are based on a primary color applied to the background page of the survey. Different shades of that color are then applied to the header, background of the form and submit button.  The Theme also defines the color assigned to the text in your form, so it contrasts over the background. A second group of default themes uses a background image as the driver for all the visual components in the form.  You can use the themes included as they are. We added a good set of them and you can switch and see how they play out with your own surveys very quickly.     You can also use the included Survey Themes as a starting point to your own design.  That is, you can select a basic theme and then edit it.  The editable properties of a Theme are split as follows:   Header: You are already familiar with this element. The theme sets the background color of the header and also the text color. You can easily tweak this as you see fit. Content:The content category refers to the portion of your form containing all the questions. There are a number of important properties:    Content Background: The content background sits right underneath your survey questions and should not be confused with the page background, which I will describe later. The purpose of the Content Background is to ensure that all questions in your survey are legible. You will want a nice contrast between your questions and the content background: A light background goes with dark question text and inputs, and vice versa. In the vast majority of cases, you will want to use a solid color for your Content Background. If you want to get creative, you can experiment with images for the Content Background as well, but you need to be careful not to overload it with colors, which would only create distractions. When it comes to images for the Background Content, it is best to use lightly textured images.  Below are a couple of examples using images to create a notebook and wrinkled paper feel.     When using content background images, you will want to play with the different Image Fit strategies available (Repeat, Repeat Vertically, Fit and Center). For both color and image custom content backgrounds, you can adjust the opacity level, which can give you interesting effects when working in combination with the page background. Content Text Color: This setting refers to the color used for labels in your questions.  As described above, the color choice for the text depends on the background color.  You will always want to look for good contrast to make your questions more legible.  The content text color is not necessarily applied to hints and notes, as those can override the font colors as specified in the Design view. Input Background Color: This refers to all the space used to input data. Think of the color of text input boxes for example, but also the background for choices in lists, signature pad, etc. Input Text Color: This applies to all response text.   Web Page: The Web Page element represents all the background behind your actual form content.  This element is visible in desktops and tablets, but it is mostly hidden in smartphone form factors.  You can manipulate the color and image shown in the Web Page background, allowing you to give a strong look to your smart form. The Web Page background is probably the element that can bring the most character to your design. In the following example, I set a colorful image as the background of the page, for my form to stand up strongly, and to highlight the core mission of the form: trees.     As mentioned above, you can use the opacity setting in the Content Background to create interesting visual effects against the Page Background. The next screenshot shows a medium opacity level applied to the Content Background, to create a subtle translucent effect.     The Web Page Background is only shown by the Survey123 Web App. The Survey123 Field App ignores the background because the from content is always expanded to take advantage of all the real estate of your device. Thank You Screen   The Thank You Screen can be optionally presented in Web Forms right after a survey is submitted.  This is the perfect place for you to thank the survey respondent for taking the time to complete the form, acknowledge the work of your project sponsors or highlight your own organization.     You can include formatted text, links and even custom images within the Thank You Note. I like to give some love to the Thank You Screen in my surveys, particularly when they are public, because they give it a nice touch. If you look carefully at the bottom of the Thank You Screen dialog, you can optionally enable users to take submit data again with your survey, right after submitting. This option simply adds a link in the Thank You Screen that will quickly take you back to the survey.   Miscellaneous tips and other things to keep in mind   Size of images: Keep the size of your images light. The bigger your images the longer it will take for your survey to load. Setting custom colors: When setting up the colors for your text and backgrounds, you can use hexadecimal values. Using web browser plugins such as ColorZilla you can easily obtain these hexadecimal values from a website and apply them to your survey visual elements. See the next animation for details.     Never underestimate the importance of making your surveys look great.  A good look, can go a long way in terms of helping you get the best data from users. ... View more

Starting with version 3.1, you can dynamically change the label of a question, using answers from other questions in the form. Dynamic question labels are particularly handy when working with very long forms, making questions in your survey more meaningful to end-users. The Water Violation survey sample on the side, for example, shows how you can insert the Type of Violation and Name of Offender in the photo and signature questions that follow. This is quite a simple example to illustrate the idea. As your survey includes questions across multiple groups, repeats and even pages, dynamic labels become critical to aid with form navigation and to avoid user input errors.  The dynamic labels technique is often described in survey jargon as question piping, where user responses are inserted or piped into questions further into the survey. You can add dynamic labels to your forms using Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS. Once published, dynamic labels will work in both the Survey123 web as well as the field apps. The basics of dynamic labels in XLSForm In order to insert text dynamically within a question label, you must add XLSForm variables in the label column of your survey. The syntax is quite simple. Insert ${QuestionName} exactly where you want the answer to a particular question in the survey to appear in your label.  This is what the Water Violation example illustrated above looks like in XLSForm. You can add multiple variables to the same label but it is important to highlight that the use of full XLSForm expressions within the label column is not supported.  Survey123 will only replace XLSForm variables. For example, this is valid: But this is not valid: While you cannot use full XLSForm expressions within the label, you can use them in a calculate question, and then reference your calculate question in the label. Calculate questions will not show in your form, but will help you hold the output of full XLSForm expressions, so you can insert those values in a label. For example, lets pretend you want to use a dynamic label in a note to describe the total cost of repairs of a pipe, given its length: The cost question is a calculate. It will not be shown in the form to the end-user. We use the cost calculate question to run a full expression that evaluates the total cost, and once we have that, we simply use it for our dynamic label. Working with different data types   As you work with dynamic labels, you will notice that things are straight-forward when you want to insert values from questions of type text, decimal or integer.  All you will need to do is to reference these questions directly exactly as shown above.  When working with other types such as dates or select questions, things are a bit more complicated and you will need to pre-process user values through calculate questions before you insert them into the label. Dates: If you want to insert a date value within a label, you must first use a calculate question and apply the format-date() function. There are some details about formatting dates in https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2016/04/17/dates-and-time-in-survey123-for-arcgis  After doing this, you can bring the formatted date value string from the calculate question, into your label. Select_one questions: If you want to bring a user selection from a select_one question into a dynamic label, you have to keep in mind that by default, you are going to get the choice name value, not the label of the selected choice.  If you want to display the label of the selected choice, then I suggest you use a calculate using the jr:choice-name() function. Support for the XLSForm jr:choice-name() function was introduced in Survey123 in version 3.1 in both the field and web Survey123 apps.  This function takes two inputs: a string representing a choice name, and a second string representing the name of the select question. Note that the second parameter requires you to enclose the question with quotes. The output of this function is the label of the choice name passed-in.  If this function is used in a multi-language survey, the label returned is that of the active language.   Select_multiple questions: Select_multiple questions let you choose one or more values from a predefined list. The output of a select_multiple question is a comma-separated string representing all the values selected by the user. This output, as is, is not the easiest to handle with dynamic labels, but again you can use other calculate questions to properly massage the output before it is added to your question label.  The https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2017/08/30/understanding-multiple-choice-questions-in-survey123-for-arcgis  blog post describes in more detail how multiple choice questions behave and how you can work and control its outputs. Other things to consider   There are some obvious and not so obvious things to consider when working with dynamic labels: If you reference in your label a question for which the user has not provided an answer, then your question is going to have some missing text.  You can choose to be clever with the label. For example, in our Water Violation Example it is not evident when the violation type is missing. You will either read “Photo of the violation” (No violation type chosen) or “Photo of the Broken Pipe violation” (if Broken Pipe has been chosen).  In practice, you will not always get so lucky when the variable is missing.  In the pipe cost repair example above, it is evident that we are missing something in the total cost note when a dollar amount is not present.  You can choose to use a relevant statement to hide questions with dynamic labels until the variable to be replaced (in our example the cost or repair) has a valid value. In these cases, you can use the string-length() function as shown in the following example. Your dynamic labels will certainly look great in the survey, but what about when you bring your survey layers into web maps? Or when you look at your survey data in the Survey123 website? On this one, it is important to understand what really happens when your survey is published, and how the Survey123 website as well as other ArcGIS apps work with your survey layers. When you publish an XLSForm document with Survey123 Connect, we take the values in the name column of your survey spreadsheet and we use them to create new fields in the survey feature layer.  By default, we use the contents of the label XLSForm column to define the field aliases of your attribute fields.  Typically, ArcGIS apps will use the field alias for display purposes. This is the case in the popup of a web map as well as throughout the Survey123 website. When you insert a dynamic label, your field aliases will include the variable placeholder and that will not look very nice.  If you are worried about this, make sure you set the alias value for your attribute fields in the esri::bind:esriFieldAlias XLSForm column.  Alternatively, you can also refine the field aliases, after the survey is published, from the Item Details page of the feature layer item. If used wisely, dynamic labels can help you build better and more user friendly smart forms.  We hope this new feature is useful to you! ... View more