Latest Contributions by IsmaelChivite

In this blog post I will describe how you can configure smart sketching in your surveys, step by step.  Smart Sketching was introduced in version 2.4 of Survey123 and allows you to embed questions in your form where users can draw or sketch. Depending on how you configure your survey, you can let users sketch on top of an empty canvas, on top of predefined diagrams, and even on top of photos. There are multiple scenarios where sketching can be handy: When performing inspections, a user can take a photo of an asset and sketch on it to highlight issues. Alternatively, the inspector could annotate over a diagram representing the asset.  When submitting a traffic accident report, a police officer can use the sketch capabilities in Survey123 to illustrate the positions of the vehicles involved and skid marks. Free-form sketches in Survey123 allow conservationists to highlight certain features/marks of a whale which can be used later to track the individual specimen across different observation reports. Sketches and annotated images and photos are automatically persisted by Survey123 as a geodatabase attachment, ensuring you can access them from other ArcGIS tools. For the instructions below, some familiarity with XLSForms and Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS is assumed. A series of video-tutorials on XLSForms are available in our YouTube Survey123 playlist.                The Basics: Draw and Annotate appearances In order to add sketching capabilities into your own survey, you need to use the draw or annotate appearances on survey questions of type image.  It is easier than it sounds: In your XLSFile, using Survey123 Connect, simply add a question of type image, and then set the value of its appearance column to either draw or annotate. In Survey123 Connect, create a New Survey using the Advanced template and add a question as follows: type name label appearance image accident_diagram Vehicle Collision Diagram draw Now use the survey preview in Survey123 Connect to exercise the sketching widget. The draw appearance enables a full screen drawing pad where you can use pencils of multiple colors and thickness for your sketches. The draw appearance is ideal when you want end users to draw an idea on top of a white canvas. Note that you can: Add an arrow by drawing a straight line. Add text by tapping on the screen. Add shapes of any form through free-drawing. Circles and rectangles will be automatically smoothed for you. The annotate appearance is similar to draw, except that it allows the user to set the background of the canvas with a photo.   Use the annotate appearance when you expect users to first take a photo of something, and then sketch on top of it.  The same sketching tools available in the draw appearance are also available for annotate. Advanced Techniques: Using Defaults and Calculations Rather than starting with an empty canvas, you can configure your survey to present users with a custom background image in the sketching pad.  Before you can reference your image, you must copy it into the media folder of your survey directory.   In Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS, while looking at the preview of your survey, click on the 'Open survey content folder' button. Once the survey folder is open, look for the media directory and copy all your images in there.  To play safe, copy images in either .png or .jpg format only.  Be considerate with the size of the images: You want images big enough to look good in phones and tablets, but try to reduce their size as much as possible or otherwise the initial download of your survey into devices will take longer than usual. Most tablets and phones will do pretty well with images smaller than 1920x1080 pixels. Now that your images are in the media folder. You can reference them in the survey: Default: If you always want to display the same background image in the sketching pad, reference your image using the default column. You do not need to enclose the name of your file in quotes, but you will want to make sure you include both the name and file extension. In the next example, the image coyote.png will always be used as background for the draw widget. type name label default appearance image animal_observations Highlight  where animal was hurt coyote.png draw Calculation: If you want to dynamically switch the background image based on previous responses in your survey, use the calculation column.  A typical scenario for this is that where you present users with a choice question and then you switch the background according to user selection.  Say for example, you first let user select the type of tower inspection being inspected. The drawing canvas background will change depending on the type. Lets do this step by step: Ensure you have all your images in the media folder.  For simplicity, make sure the extension for all the images is the same. That is, make sure they are either all .png or .jpg. Create a list in the choices worksheet where the value of the name column for choices in your list matches the name of filenames in the media folder. Set the expression in the calculation column of your draw or annotate question as: concat(${ChoiceQuestion},'.png') In the example above, I assume that your choice question is a select_one type of question named ChoiceQuestion. I also assume that your images are in .png format. Remember that all the concat() function does is to concatenate the value of the selected choice in your select_one question, with the .png extension. You could certainly get more fancy with the calculation, but the heart of how this is done is described above. It is always easier to learn with an actual example. The Transmission Tower example is available under the Community category in Survey123 Connect: Log into Survey123 Connect Click on New Survey Select the Community category and then choose the Transmission Tower sample A few extra tips and things you should know All sketches will be saved as geodatabase attachments once submitted to ArcGIS. This means that you can always easily access sketches associated with a submitted feature. If you use the default or calculation columns to predefine the background of the drawing canvas, keep in mind that iOS (iPhones and iPads). You must reference images making sure that the capitalization in your XLSForm is exactly as in the filenames. Once the user creates the sketch, a preview of the sketch will be made available in the survey. Note that at that point the user can change the name of the image.  Calculating the name of the image filename is not possible at this time. Support for defaults and calculations on draw and annotate images is missing in the WebForm. Only the Survey123 field app will honor your defaults and calculations. [Fixed as of 2.6] As of version 2.4, it  is not possible to let users choose a background for the drawing canvas using an existing image from the photo gallery. This is something that we want to add in the future. As of 2.4, you can only use images from the media folder or let users take a photo on the spot and use it as background. If you are using the Inbox to edit existing features, be aware that as of 2.4 the Inbox does not support images of any type (signatures, photos, drawings or annotated images). If you bring a photo from your gallery or camera into the Draw and Annotate widgets, the EXIF data in your image will be stripped out and lost once submitted  to ArcGIS. As usual, we are eager to hear your feedback. This is a new feature and would love to hear your feedback so we can take next steps with it. Enjoy! ... 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[Last updated October 11, 2019] [Last updated March 15, 2021]   Typically, when you publish a new survey with Survey123 Connect or the web designer, a new feature service is created on your behalf. Data submitted with your survey will be stored into that new feature service. We built Survey123 this way because we wanted to simplify as much as possible the process of building new surveys. We did not want people having to worry about feature classes, domains and all of that. Instead, we took an approach where the focus is on adding questions and rules to a form, and leave the creation of the data model to the software. There are some valid cases however, where you may want to publish a survey that works on top of an existing feature service; In this blog post I will describe how this can be done.    Why would you publish a survey on top of an existing feature service? There are multiple scenarios where building a survey on top of  an existing feature service  makes sense. I will describe in more detail some of them: Databases: ArcGIS Enterprise allows you to create feature services on top of commercial databases like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, etc. There are good reasons why people want data in them although in most cases the key is interoperability. Data in databases can be handled via SQL queries which many software stacks, including ArcGIS, support. In order to have Survey123 add, update or read data from these databases you must first create a feature service on top of them and have your survey work with it. Existing data: You may have feature services that were created way before Survey123 existed.  By building Survey123 smart forms on top of these feature services, you want to be able not only to add new features, but even update existing ones. A classic example is asset inspections: You may already have feature services with thousands of assets... what if you want to now have Survey123 work against these assets to enable inspections through smart forms? One feature service, many surveys: In some scenarios, you may want to create multiple surveys on top of the same feature service.  For example, say you have 3 distinct geographic areas where different field crews operate.  While you want to consolidate all data in a single feature service, you also want to tailor the survey for each team.   Each field  crew will use its own flavor of the survey, including a distinct offline basemap, custom defaults and trimmed-down choice lists according to the area at hand.  Another example is that where you want to use Survey123 to manage the complete life-cycle of an incident: one survey is used to report a case, a second survey is used to review the initial report and may be a third survey is used to close the case.  In this scenario, all three surveys work against the same feature service, but each presents or hides different questions according to the purpose of the survey at each step of the cycle. Pre-requisites Survey123 can only work against feature services where the supportsApplyEditsWithGlobalID property is set to true.  There is a detailed explanation of how to meet this requirement in the https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2018/07/17/how-to-turn-supportsapplyeditswithgloablids-on-your-feature-layers blog post, but in short here what you will need: Your feature layer must be either hosted in ArcGIS Enterprise or ArcGIS Online. If using a multiuser geodatabase, layers can use Branch versioning, but not Traditional versioning. To understand the difference betwen the two, check this help topic. Your layer must have an indexed GlobalID field and all relationships, including attachment tables, must leverage GlobalID fields. How to create a survey on top of an existing feature service? You can build a survey on top of an existing feature service using Survey123 Connect.  First. you will need to be logged-in against ArcGIS Online or your own ArcGIS Enterprise instance.  Then simply click on New Survey and select the Feature Service option.     Once you select the Feature Service option, the gallery on the right will show you every feature service shared with your account.  For ArcGIS Online, this will include all hosted feature services and in ArcGIS Enterprise, all hosted feature services plus all federated feature services shared with you.  If you want to use a service from an ArcGIS Server instance that is not federated with Portal for ArcGIS, then you will need to follow instructions in this KB article to register your service in your portal through a feature layer item.  Otherwise, your service will not be shown in the gallery. Ok, so next you need to select the feature service of your interest and give your survey a name.  Once you click on Create Survey, Survey123 Connect will look into your feature service, checking all fields, related tables and geodatabase domains. A new XLSForm will be created for you as a starting point for your survey. I will call it the initial XLSForm design.   Understanding the initial XLSForm design In the next few sections I will describe the rules followed by Survey123 Connect to generate the initial XLSForm design. Understanding these rules is important, because you will often want modify the initial XLSForm to tailor the user experience of field users using your survey. One question per feature layer field: Other than a few exotic exceptions, that I will describe later, Survey123 Connect will add a new question to your initial XLSForm design for every field in the first  layer of your feature service.  The questions will be added to the survey XLSForm worksheet in the same  order as fields appear in your feature layer.  You can reorder the questions in your survey and you can also remove any questions you may want to hide.  Reordering questions can be very handy, because the order of fields in a table may not respond to the logical order in which you want people to enter data in your form.  Removing questions in the XLSForm can also be useful, because you may have fields in your feature layer that you do not want to expose to users. Think of internal fields that people in the back-office will use but that are not meant to be visible to field users for example. XLSForm Question types: The initial XLSForm design assigns XLSForm question types based on the corresponding feature layer field type, according to the following table: esriFieldTypeInteger integer esriFieldTypeDouble decimal esriFieldTypeString text esriFieldTypeDate datetime esriFieldTypeGeometry (point) geopoint esriFieldTypeGeometry (polyline) geotrace esriFieldTypeGeometry (polygon) geoshape esriFieldTypeGUID text   There are some notable exceptions to the rule above. First, reserved fields in your feature layer will not be added to your XLSForm: ObjectID, GlobalID and Editor Tracking Fields will be ignored. If your layer includes attachments, you will need to add image questions manually. Fields in your feature layer that have a coded value domain will be modeled as select_one questions and the corresponding coded values will be automatically added as a list in the choices worksheet. The correspondence of Esri field types to question types in XLSForm, as described above, is a best guess to ensure data consistency. That is, if you were to publish the survey, you are guaranteed to be able to submit data to all fields in the feature service.  However, you may want to adjust the XLSForm types depending on your needs. For example: Esri date fields are modeled in XLSForms as datetime, but you can choose to change the XLSForm to just time (if you want to capture time) or date (if you do not care about the time).  You should avoid changing the XLSForm question type to decimal or text for example, because the types would not be compatible. Esri string fields will be translated by Survey123 Connect as text questions, but you could switch the XLSForm type to integer or decimal for example if you wanted to provide a numeric user input.  You could also use question types such as barcode against text fields. If attachments are enabled in your feature layer, you can add one or more image or audio type of questions in your XLSForm. One key concept to remember is that the XLSForm question type fundamentally defines the type of user input that will be presented in the form. As long as the input captures a data type that is compatible with the corresponding target feature layer field, you are fine.  For example: Do not expect the calendar control exposed by a date XLSForm question to generate data that is compatible with a field of type decimal.  Now, if you feel like you can accelerate data capture using a barcode question against a string field, you can replace the initial text type of question with a barcode question because barcode question types will always return an output that can be stored as a string. You can also use the appearance XLSForm column to refine the user input experience. XLSForm bind::esri:fieldType and fieldLength: If you look carefully at your XLSForm, you will also note that Survey123 Connect added in the bind::esri:fieldType column the exact Esri data type found for fields in your feature layer.  The bind::esri:fieldLength column will also contain the length originally set to your feature layer fields. You should never change the esri:fieldType, because they are defined by the feature layer and Connect will not be able to change your layer.  You could change the length, as long you make it shorter. Making the length shorter in XLSForm allows you to limit the user input. For example, if your field has a length in the feature layer of 200 characters but you want to limit the user input from your survey to 5, simply change the bind:esri:fieldLength value to 5.  You are not allowed to specify a fieldLength in your XLSForm that exceeds the actual length of the field in your feature layer. You will rarely have to change the bind::esri:fieldLength and bind::esri:fieldType columns. If you do, you may trigger an error when attempting to publish the survey.  The reason is that Survey123 Connect has a built-in check to ensure that a published survey is compatible with the underlying schema of your feature service. If the schema are not compatible, then you will not be allowed to publish the survey.  Tinkering with the bind::esri:fieldLength and in particular with bind::esri:fieldType can easily result on schema inconsistencies. Question Names and Labels: The XLSForm name column reflects the exact field names found in your feature layer. You cannot change the values in this column.  The label column is populated using the field name alias from your feature layer. You can do whatever you want with the label column (except leaving it empty).  You may want to rephrase questions, embed  html formatting etc, etc    Repeats (related tables): In the event that the first layer in your feature service is related to other layers or standalone tables, you will see the presence of repeats in the XLSForm.  In Survey123 we model related geodatabase tables/layers as repeats.  The name of the repeat will be defined by the table name of the related table or layer and cannot be changed. The label of the repeat can contain any text you like. Within the XLSForm repeat block, you will find questions corresponding to the fields found in the related child table. The rules for how questions are added within a repeat are exactly the same as for questions in the main feature layer. The rules for changing question types, labels etc as well as for removing or reordering them are the same too.  Just be aware you cannot take questions outside of the repeat (removing them is fair game, but not to take them out of the repeat block and into the main block of the form) Select_ones: I want to add a few notes on how select_one questions behave.  In short, every time a field in your feature service uses a coded value domain, a new select_one type of question is created.  The coded value domains are matched by a corresponding XLSForm list in the choices worksheet.  You are free to reduce the number of choices in the list if that makes sense for you. You can also change the labels in the list as you see fit.  The values in the name column of the choices worksheet need to remain unchanged because otherwise, you will be adding data into your feature service outside the valid values set by your geodatabase domain. Range domains are modeled as range questions in XLSForms. Geodatabase subtypes and contingent values are ignored by Survey123, although you can use cascading selects to model them. Other XLSForm columns and question types:  As far as the survey worksheet in your XLSForm, columns and question types other than the ones described above will not be used. That is, the default, calculation, constraint, relevant columns etc will be empty.  Question types such as groups, notes or calculates will also never be present in the initial XLSForm design.  Now: you can, and should, use those extra columns and question types as appropriate to build a great data capture experience. For example: You can use XLSForm groups and pages to break down questions in your survey into logical sections. This simplifies and accelerates data capture without altering the original geodatabase schema in your feature layer. You can leverage XLSForm notes and hints to provide field users with critical information to capture data more  efficiently. Similarly, notes and hints have no effect on the geodatabase schema. You can use constraints, relevant statements as well as input masks, calculations and defaults to better control user input. Appearances are also a great way to optimize the field data capture experience. The initial XLSForm design is just that: a starting point. Take pride of your surveys and transform flat GIS data models into beautiful smart forms. Once you are happy with your design, you will proceed to publish your survey. When publishing, no new feature service will be created for your form. Instead, the feature service you selected will be referenced by your survey. Settings worksheet: The settings worksheet of the initial XLSForm contains two key pieces of information: submission_url: This column defines the url of the feature layer item in your ArcGIS Organization on which responses to your survey will be stored. This is the exact url of the feature layer you chose in the Create New Survey dialog as the seed of your survey.  Note that this is the url to the feature layer item, rather than the url of the feature service itself.  form_id: This column defines the name of the layer in your feature service that your survey will hit.  If empty, your initial  XLSForm design will always point to the first layer found in your feature service. While you often may not want to change the submission_url, there is one use case where  changing the form_id is very handy.  Think for example, that you want to create a survey on top of a related standalone table.  For clarity, lets think of a feature service with parcels (polygons) and their related assessments.  You may not want to build a survey to edit the parcels, but you may want to create one to create the assessments. Typically, when you get the initial XLSForm design, you will have questions in your survey for all the fields in the parcels layer and then a repeat group, with all questions in the related assessment table. This is only because in a feature service, typically the layer with geometries (parcels in our case) goes first, and then the related tables.  To create your parcel assessment survey you will delete all questions  corresponding to the parcels layer from your survey and then take the name of your assessments repeat and put it into the form_id setting.  Finally you will delete the begin_repeat and end_repeat rows in your survey.  To ensure that assessment data is properly attached to the corresponding parcel, it is important that in your survey you preserve a question to enter the unique identifier of the parcel. You will need to know what field in the child assessment table is used for the geodatabase relationship. Limitations when working with Repeats in your XLSForm: Mapping the ArcGIS geodatabase model into an XLSForm is possible to some extent, but there are some limitations to bear in mind.  In the case that you are working with existing feature services published from ArcGIS Desktop, there are chances that you could run into some situations where you simply cannot build a survey on top of a feature service, or at least not the exact survey that you had in mind.   The truth is that you can actually build surveys pretty much on top of any feature service, except when working with related tables.  Lets get into the details: The XLSForm specification does not accept two questions in a single survey with the same name. This makes sense because otherwise you could not uniquely reference the question in your XLSForm expression.   When working with existing feature services this will be a problem when you have related tables AND fields in both tables with the same name.  In some cases this is not a real problem because you may not want to include the repeat on the survey. You may also be able to delete one of the questions referencing the duplicated field name (from either the main body of the survey, or from within the repeat). But this is not always the case... The XLSForm specification does not accept spaces in the name of a repeat.  This is a problem when you have a related table in your feature layer that includes spaces in the name. If you encounter this you can do two things: One is obviously to delete the repeat group from your survey all together. If you cannot delete the repeat then you can ask the owner of the feature service to publish the feature service again, eliminating the space in the name of the related table. Of course this may not be possible in many cases, but I bring this up because changing the name of a layer in the feature layer does not imply changing the name of the table in the database.  All you need to do is to change the name of the layer in the table of contents in ArcGIS Desktop and publish again. The XLSForm specification does not like spaces in the name column of the choices worksheet: This will be a problem when you have coded values in a domain that include spaces in them. Fortunately, you will only get a warning when validating your XLSForm in Connect. You will actually be able to publish your survey with no problem, but it is not good practice to use spaces.  It is also technically possible to encounter coded values in domains that exceed the maximum length of 32 characters allowed by choice names. Some tips and other things to be aware of: In the old days of Survey123, people used to create the initial XLSForm designs by hand and from scratch. If you really understand the meaning of the submission_url and form_id XLSFom settings and you understand how to map fields in your feature service to XLSForm question types, you can do it.  Typically using the Create Survey from Feature service option as described above is the best way to go, but forcing yourself to build a survey from scratch on top of an existing feature service will be a good learning experience. Sharing can be problematic! Keep in mind that while you will always be the owner of the survey you are publishing, you may not be the owner of the underlying feature service.  Unless you are the owner, you can't really control the sharing, so you will want to make sure that your feature service is made available to users that will access your survey. Capabilities: Similarly, unless you are the owner of the feature service, you will have no control over the update, query, delete and add capabilities of the feature service. It is your responsibility to make sure your survey is consistent with the capabilities enabled in the service. For example, if the feature service does not support updates, then you should not enable the Inbox. Hosted Feature Layer Views: You can create surveys on top of hosted feature layer views.  Views are a clever way to securely limit access to features and or columns in an existing feature service. Views also allow you to better control sharing of your feature service.  There are some scenarios where you may want to create surveys on top of views, rather than directly on top of the feature service.   ... View more

Ahoy, matey! September 19 is Talk like a Pirate Day, so All hands hoay! Weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen!  2.4 has arrived! Refresh your browser cache to access the latest features in the Survey123 website. You can install Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS from our download page. The Survey123 mobile app is available in the Google Play, Amazon and iTunes stores. The 2.4 release is loaded with new functionality, enhancements and critical fixes.  I organized the major highlights below under the Survey123 website and Survey123 field app and Connect categories.  To illustrate some of the new features, I published a couple of public surveys that you can download into your device. Survey123 website Likert Scales in Web Designer: The Likert scale type of question has been added to the Survey123 Web Designer. Likert scales are the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research and they are named after its inventor, psychologist Rensis Likert. Typically a Likert scale is used to allow people respond to questions of interest, in order to measure people's attitudes, but a Likert scale can also be applied to other more  general questions where you want to select a choice among a range of sorted options. You will find the Likert type of question available in the Common Questions section of Web Designer. Simply drag and drop it to your survey! You will be able to easily change the labels shown in your scale as well as the number of options available. Excel and KML output formats in the Data tab: From the Data tab you can now export your survey data to KML and Excel formats.  These two new outputs go on top of CSV, Shapefile and File Geodatabase formats already available. Access Group details from the Collaborate tab: A new link has been added in the Collaborate tab to let you easily access group details. This is useful when you need to know, for example, which users belong to a group, or what other surveys or maps are accessible to a particular group. Map skipped questions in the Analyze Tab: This one is a subtle enhancement, but quite useful in some cases. As you know, in the Analyze tab you can represent in a map the responses given to a particular question in your survey. Up until now, surveys where your question had been left unanswered (skipped) would  not be  shown in the map. Starting with this release we will add the locations of surveys where the question was skipped and flag them as such.  This can help you in some QA/QC workflows where knowing in what locations a particular question was skipped is important. Other enhancements and fixes: Among the many minor enhancements and fixes in the Survey123 website, I will highlight the following: BUG-000106888 Question hints now support special characters (such as %). This issue caused some trouble before. BUG-000105851 This fix accounts for some situations where the map extent in the Individual Response report was set incorrectly. BUG-000099612 Integer values are reported as decimals in the Analyze Tab in Survey123 website. When you rename a survey using the Edit Survey Info dialog, the name of your survey’s folder in ArcGIS will change accordingly. The Individual Response report in the Data tab now will work well in cases where you nest a repeat within a group. Web Forms now support pulldata functions working against geopoint questions. Blank text boxes no longer display under note questions. Fixes to select_multiple questions on Firefox. Survey123 Connect and Field App Support for editing repeats: Back when we released version 2.0 of Survey123, we introduced the concept of the Inbox. The Inbox folder can be enabled in a survey to support editing of existing records from the Survey123 field app. If you are not familiar with the Inbox, I recommend you watch this 2 minute video tutorial. One of the biggest limitations of the initial implementation of the Inbox in 2.0, however, was that it did not support working with repeat groups (which use related records). With version 2.4, that limitation is gone. As of 2.4 you can include in your Inbox surveys that contain repeats, but even more importantly, you can tightly control how these repeated questions (related records) can be edited. In some cases, for example, you may want to hide existing related records, but allow field users to add new ones. In other cases you may want to let people look at existing related records for their reference, but not change them. You may even want to limit the number of related records that can be displayed or edited.    At first, the mechanics of enabling editing on a survey with repeats is no different than usual. As described in this help topic, all you need to do is to activate the Inbox folder in your survey. By default, surveys in the Inbox will allow you to add new entries into the repeat (creating new related records), but you will not be able to see any related records that may already exist. This behavior is adequate for workflows where you want to let people add additional related records to a feature, but you do not want the field user to see other related records. Using a new column in the XLSForm called bind::esri:parameters you can control which related records will be downloaded into the mobile device, and whether you want to make them editable or not. In this column you can add one or more of the following parameters as key-value pairs, separated by a space: query: The query parameter specifies which related records will be downloaded for display and/or editing purposes. By default, no query is set, so no related records are fetched. If you add something like query=’LastInspectionYear>1995’, only inspections after 1995 will be shown. You can also add a query such as query=’1=1’ to force all related records to be fetched. As a shortcut, if you simply add the parameter query with no additional query expression, all related records will be fetched. allowUpdates: Controls if downloaded related records can be edited or not. This parameter can be set to either true or false. If you include allowUpdates=false, then your downloaded related records will not be editable.  Just for clarity, if the field user adds any new additional related records, those will be editable even if this parameter is set to false. You will want to set this parameter to false when you do not want  field users to edit related records that already exist in your feature service. allowAdd: Controls whether new rows can be added to a repeat. This parameter can be set to true or false, but the default is true.: i.e. allowAdds=true. Note that this parameter only affects surveys that have already been submitted (in the sent box) or downloaded to the Inbox. When collecting a new survey, new related rows can always be added irrespective of the parameter. orderBy: Lets you specify the order in which related records will be displayed within your repeat. e.g. orderBy=occupant_name will order related records by the occupant_name field. Using one or a combination of the parameters above you have great flexibility to control the experience for the field user. With this new implementation, it is possible to support a wide variety of asset inspection workflows for example. As of this release, the Inbox lacks support for downloading attachments. That is, you can use the Inbox against a survey that includes attachments, but  the Inbox will not populate  signatures, annotated images, audio or image questions.  All these types of questions will appear empty, as if they had no data. As for the rest of questions, you will be able to download  data for them and update  them as well. Also, to play on the safe side, when you edit surveys from your Inbox we will disable editing on these types of questions. This means that if you open a survey from your Inbox  to make edits to it, all questions of type image (photos, signature, annotate, draw) as well as audio questions will appear not only empty, but also disabled. This is to avoid people from accidentally attempting to change data  in them. We are considering adding support in a future release for editing attachments. To learn more about editing with repeats, check this help topic. Savvy? Audio questions: We have run into quite a few requests lately for audio questions, so we decided to add support for them. Some requests came from conservation projects where specific types of birds (and frogs) had to be recorded. We also run into folks doing surveys of toponyms where it was necessary to capture the pronunciation of placenames in the local language. Recording audio has also been requested by people who need to capture information very quickly for later processing, and we even were told that audio recording would be used to help create noise maps. In this first implementation, the audio type of question will not let you capture more than 2  minutes worth of recording, although we plan to let you record for longer in the future.  Audio recordings are stored as attachments in the underlying feature service. We have published a public sample audio survey so you can try this new question yourself. In your mobile device, install the latest version of the Survey123 field app and navigate to: http://bit.ly/Survey123Audio   This link will open the sample audio survey so you can record audio. Alternatively scan the barcode on the side to open the survey in your phone.  If you want to look at the  data you submitted  and listen to your recording, use  this web mapping application. If you want to add an audio question to your survey, simply use the  new audio question type. Audio questions are supported exclusively in the Survey123 field app. Audio questions are not supported in web browsers.  Please note  that existing surveys you may have created will not give  you a choice to  select the new audio question when you use the dropdown list in the  type column of your XLSForm.  You will need to  either use a new Advanced Template or manually add the audio choice into the list  manually. Signature, Draw and Annotate: You may already be familiar with the ability in Survey123  to capture signatures. This was added way back in 2015. When the signature appearance is set on an image type of question, a small signature-pad is presented to the user. This signature-pad is of small size and has a white background over which you can sign using black ink: Simple. With 2.4, you can also use the draw appearance, which essentially enables a drawing-pad: it is bigger and it lets you use pens of different colors and thickness. This drawing-pad is ideal to capture simple sketches and diagrams. The annotate appearance goes one step beyond, allowing you draw on top of a photo or background image.  The photo can be taken on the spot by the field user, or calculated in your XLSForm. The use of the annotate appearance on image questions has many applications. In an inspection workflow, you can use the annotate appearance to let users take a photo of the asset and highlight in the photo any repairs that are needed. Arrows, text, circles and freeform sketches in different colors are allowed.   You can also choose to set the background of the drawing pad to a predefined image, such as a diagram of the asset. Say for example you are inspecting transmission towers (electricity pylons). Using a calculation, you can display the appropriate schema of the transmission tower model being inspected so inspectors can markup the diagram to highlight defects. To set the background of the annotate drawing pad to a predefined image, you need to copy the png or jpg image\s into the media folder of your survey.  Then, you can reference them from either the default or calculation columns of your XLSForm.  Shiver me timbers! In the above transmission tower inspection survey the background shown in the annotate question is defined by the transmission tower type. Note that I added a select_one question with choices for Steel H Frame, Tubular Steel and Wood H Frame. I use the response to this question to select the appropriate transmission tower illustration.  Once markup such as circles, text and arrows have been added to the diagram, the resulting image gets saved. Without aiming at illustrating what an actual Transmission Tower Inspection looks like, but simply to show how you can dynamically set the background of the annotate question, I published the Transmission Tower Inspection survey so you can try it in your device.  Try opening http://bit.ly/TransmissionTower  or scanning the QRCode on the side. Signature, Draw and Annotate appearances are not yet supported in web browsers. Autosave: As of 2.4, the Survey123 field app will automatically save all user input in the device immediately after entered. In case that the user accidentally closes the app, or even worse, when it crashes, all data will be safely saved.  When the app is started again, a dialog will prompt the user to either recover the app (and the data) to the point where it was last, or start with a new survey from scratch. The autosave functionality is enabled by default, so you do not need to do anything to take advantage of it. In very large surveys with hundreds of questions, you may however choose to trigger the autosave functionality at specific points in your survey. In our own testing we have not observed a noticeable slow down due to autosaving, but we wanted to expose a mechanism so you can control it more tightly if you consider this necessary. A new column in XLSForm called bind:saveInComplete lets you trigger autosave for the entire form at specific points within your survey. Simply add the value true to this column to indicate you want to trigger autosave at that question.  If you leave the entire bind:saveInComplete column empty, Survey123 will automatically autosave on every question. Null field type: We heard again and again, that sometimes you want to add questions into a smart-form but not necessarily persist any data for that question in the feature service.  Sometimes the idea is that you want to capture some user-input, to then do some calculations on that data and ultimately store the results of your calculations in the feature service, but not necessarily the direct input of the user. Say for example you want capture the length of a pipe in meters, but you let people enter the length in meters or in feet. You will want to add in the form one question for the length, and a second one for the units in which the length is expressed.  In the end you  only care about the length in meters, so the initial input of the user as well as the units are not stored. Only the calculated length in meters will be stored. Another example may include capturing the age of a building. You may want to ask in what year the building was built, but you really want to store just the calculated age. Another scenario where you may want to display a question in the form but not store its response is when you ask a user a binary yes or no question and you use that information to hide or show a set of questions.  Your yes/no question can help you simplify the data capture experience, but the actual response to the question is not relevant from a data perspective. As of 2.4, you can set the value of the bind::esri:fieldType column to null, to indicate that a particular question is not to be stored in the feature service and can be applied to all question types except geopoint, hidden, audio and image (as well as select questions combined with the or_other qualifier). A particular scenario where the null field type is very handy relates to multiple-choice questions.  As you may know, responses to multiple-choice questions are stored as a comma separated list of values. Using the null type of field and calculations, you can store the user selection to multiple-choice questions in a more database friendly way through a series of fields (one per choice) with binary (checked or not) values. A more in depth discussion of this technique is described in the blog post https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2017/08/30/understanding-multiple-choice-questions-in-survey123-for-arcgis  iOS11: Do not fear upgrading to iOS 11. We tested the Survey123 mobile app carefully with it, and everything runs smoothly. Other enhancements and fixes: Last but not least, here is a selection of other relevant minor enhancements and fixes for Survey123 Connect and the Survey123 field app in this release: Survey123 Connect now includes easy access to discussions in our Survey123 for ArcGIS GeoNet group. The built-in barcode reader is faster across all platforms. In Android, the barcode is now much more stable. Improved positioning in Android devices when GPS signal is not available. Various fixes in the Survey123 field app and Connect to address wrong text characters displayed in Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Thai. Select_one questions can now be  set to read-only. BUG-000104950 Survey123 for ArcGIS signature question submitted using iOS devices is only partially visible whereas is completely visible on Android and Windows devices. BUG-000103616 Renaming a photo in a repeat in the in Survey123 for ArcGIS field app changes the photo name of all photos in the survey. BUG-000106064 Deleting an image copied from 'paste answers from favorite' deletes image for all submitted records in Survey123 for ArcGIS. Survey123 for Developers The source code of Survey123 for ArcGIS is available to AppStudio for ArcGIS developers. This allows organizations to customize, extend or simply white label the Survey123 for ArcGIS field app. As usual, we have updated the source code of the Survey123 Enterprise Templates in AppStudio for ArcGIS. Please keep in mind that the next version of Survey123 for ArcGIS will be built on top of AppStudio for ArcGIS 2.1, which will be released sometime in October or early November.  Absolutely no breaking changes are expected, but keep in mind that for the next update of Survey123 you will also need to refresh your AppStudio for ArcGIS Desktop install.   A lot as you can see in this update, so we will next splice the mainbrace! ... View more