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In this blog post I will describe how you can handle elevation values (Zs) in Survey123 for ArcGIS. Typically, geopoint questions in your survey will always work in 2D. That is, only latitude and longitude will be stored. While not obvious, it is actually fairly easy to configure your surveys to work with 3D geopoints. Enabling Z-enabled feature services for your survey Every survey you publish to ArcGIS is made out of two items: a Form and a Feature service item. The Form defines the questions in your survey, as well as the validation logic, look and feel etc. The Feature service is where all the answers to your questions go. By default, when you publish your survey, a 2D Feature service is created, not allowing the storage of Z values. To ensure your Feature service is Z-enabled you must explicitly flag your geopoint question as esriFieldTypePointZ in the bind::esri:fieldType column of your XLSForm. This will look something like this: Type Name Label bind::esri:fieldType geopoint Location Asset Location esriFieldTypePointZ text AssetID Asset ID date LastInsp Last Inspected On The bind::esri:fieldType column is used when you want to have full control over the Esri field types to be used in the geodatabase. Survey123 will do its best mapping XLSForm question types into Esri field types, but sometimes, like in this case, you may want to tweak things a bit. The https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2015/08/24/xlsform-mappings-to-arcgis-feature-services-an-introduction blog post describes in more detail other reasons why you may want to use the bind::esri:fieldType column. Once your esri:fieldType is set as above, a 3D Feature service will be created on your behalf. Not totally obvious, but easy once you know the trick. Isn't? Capturing Z values in the Survey123 app Capturing Z values in the Survey123 app is also pretty straight-forward but it is important to understand a couple of things. First of all, most consumer smartphones and tablets will provide a location including an elevation value, which Survey123 will automatically use. Like with any consumer device with an integrated GNSS receiver, the accuracy of the location coordinates -including the elevation- is not expected to give you a level of accuracy beyond a few meters at best. Properly using an external GNSS receiver along with your device will in most cases improve the location values passed into Survey123 for ArcGIS and provide more consistency to the measurements. In the event that the device does not provide elevation values, Survey123 will automatically set the Z value to zero (0). Using an external GNSS receiver in combination with Survey123 will greatly improve the accuracy of elevation values captured. In this photo, Survey123 is being used with a high precision GNSS receiver from Leica Geosystems. The elevation values, as described above, are typically provided by your own device. However, if the field user modifies the provided location by tapping on the geopoint map widget and setting a new location manually, the Z values from your device will be cleared allowing the field user to set the elevation value manually. If no manual Z is set, again Survey123 will reset to the value to zero (0). Managing Z values Elevation values are always kept in the Z coordinate of the points you capture. In Esri jargon, you will be working with a 3D point feature, which tools like ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Earth and Web AppBuilder understand. In 3D features, the elevation values are kept in binary format within the geometry field of your feature service. Now, very often you will also want to store the Z value as an attribute of the feature. Having a column in your feature for your elevation values allows you to more easily access Zs in non Esri tools. For example, you can export your survey data to a CSV table and get the Z values shown in a column. Having elevation values as numeric values in an attribute is also useful within ArcGIS in cases where you want to perform QA/QC workflows or want to query and visualize these values. To extract the Z value into an attribute of your feature, you will want to create a new question in your survey and populate it with an expression in the calculation column. The next table describes an example of how to do this: Type Name Label Calculation bind::esri:fieldType geopoint location Location hidden Latitude Latitude pulldata("@geopoint", ${location}, "y") esriFieldTypeDouble hidden Longitude Longitude pulldata("@geopoint", ${location}, "x") esriFieldTypeDouble hidden Elevation Elevation pulldata("@geopoint", ${location}, "z") esriFieldTypeDouble To learn more about the pulldata function, you can read this blog post: https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2016/11/03/extracting-information-from-geopoint-questions Note that the pulldata function can be used to simply extract the Z value into a specific column that you define, but you can also use it to perform data validation right from the Survey123 app. You may for example write an expression to warn the field user if a particular crop is reported at an elevation where we know that it does not grow naturally.
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11-28-2016
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Hi. The yellow screentips are part of the cell's data validation. You can take them out of the way when they pop by hitting the Esc key. Alternatively, you can disable them in your Excel file by selecting the cell, and then going into the Data menu, then Data Validation/Data Validation and disabling the input message. You could also disable data validation entirely in the worksheet, although that may be a bit too drastic.
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11-27-2016
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Hi! Thanks for your feedback. At this moment there is option to do an 'undo' , but it is an excellent suggestion. We would need to think how can enable such behavior across all the different supported platforms. So far we have not considered this need, so thanks for bringing this up. I regards with the 'clear' button, I created the poll to measure what others think.
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11-24-2016
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Hi Sean. Thanks so much for your comment. After looking into this I found that the values captured in the field are actually stored in your Feature Service, but the Table view in survey123.arcgis.com does not show the values correctly. To validate this, please open your survey's feature service in the ArcGIS.com Map Viewer (open within a web map) and you will see that the information from your integer field is displayed in the table widget as well as in the popups. We will look into this problem in the survey123 web site and see if we can resolve. Thanks so much for your feedback.
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11-22-2016
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Hi Terry. Once an ArcGIS Online Feature Service is made public, you cannot prevent anonymous users from editing the information, unless you block editing on the feature service for everyone. Tentatively, in the December update of ArcGIS Online a new feature will be implemented allowing you to create read-only views of Feature Services. This would be useful when you want to keep the editable feature service private, and the data available for everyone to see... Coincidentally the Survey123 team will be the first to implement this feature so I guess you just got lucky We are doing our best to get this feature into Survey123 before the end of the year, but if we miss the December release we want to make it available in early 2017. Realistically, our main goal with Survey123 is first to resolve the problem where a group of people needs to capture data, and a different group (without edit privileges) needs to view the results of the survey (Data and Analyze tabs in survey123.arcgis.com). In any event, the essential foundation to solve the problem you are facing will be ready. Here are the basics of how I would see this working for you: - First you will publish a survey as usual (must be a NEW survey) - Second, you will go to the Collaborate tab in survey123.arcgis.com as usual. - This time you will have a chance to share with Groups that will submit data (as usual) and also have a new option to additionally share with Groups that will be able to see the Data and Analyze tabs. If you choose to share with these Groups a new Feature Service View will be created under your My Contents, which you will be able to manually share with everyone. This Public Feature Service view will have editing capabilities disabled. The trick here is that the Feature Service used by the Survey123 app will be secured, always forcing users to login. It is still a bit early to say exactly how things will work, but as you can see we are trying to resolve the problem. In the meantime, I suggest you ask people using the Survey123 app not to log out of it, so the editor tracking info is always sent to the feature service (even if shared publicly). You cannot enforce it, but you can always ask...
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11-21-2016
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Thanks for your note. This is a known Qt issue specific to iOS 10 devices which we have reported to the Qt company (Survey123 is built on Qt). Please note that this problem is not specific to Survey123 version 1.9.24 but rather to iOS10. This is at the top of our priorities at this moment.
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11-21-2016
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Hi Bradley! I tried to reproduce the issue you describe without success. Just in case I am not understanding your statement, I recorded a video to shows what I experienced. If the behavior you see is different you may want to clear the browse cache and try again. If the workflow described in this video is different from what you want to do, please describe in more detail so we can reproduce.
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11-19-2016
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Hi Jake. Thanks for sharing your survey. It really helps a lot having it to understand the problem. We need to look more closely into this and figure we can logically make this work. At this point, I am not clear that we can fix this behavior, without breaking other workflows. This scenario is a it tricky because the relevant statement is applied to the repeat... we need to think about this one. Can I suggest that you set a default value for your PASS_FAIL select_ones? If you can do that, the survey behaves as you would expect: If no inspection type is selected, then no data is submitted in the repeat. If you check an inspection type, then at least one inspection is submitted using the provided values (by default or user-input). On a different topic, it looks strange that one could submit a form without selecting at least one inspection type. May be you want to add a constraint to UG_INSPECTION_TYPE to ensure at least one option is checked? Something like count-selected(${UG_INSPECTION_TYPE})>0
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11-18-2016
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Hi. First thing to check is that your Windows device can connect to your portal with a web browser. If that is the case, and you can successfully login to your Portal from a web browser, then it will be best that someone in Esri Technical Support looks at this issue. Would you please contact Tech Support. You can give them a call or submit an issue online. More details here: Esri Support Home
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11-18-2016
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type name label calculation date aDate Date calculate m Month format-date(${aDate},'%n') calculate day Day format-date(${aDate},'%e') text season Season if(${m}>10,'Winter',if(${m}>7,'Fall',if(${m}>5,'Summer',if(${m}>2,'Spring','Winter'))))
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11-18-2016
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type name label calculation text uniqueID Unique ID uuid()
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11-18-2016
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Hi Jake. As you describe, when changes in your survey force an underlying schema change (add new questions, change question types etc) Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS will delete your existing feature service and replace it with one that matches your new schema. This is the default behavior when the underlying feature service was originally created by Survey123 Connect. It may be possible to handle some additional situations (such as adding questions) where we could avoid the deletion of your feature service, but we will need to explore a bit more on that one. The best way to protect your feature service from the behavior above is to use the submission_url setting. When you set this setting, the underlying feature service will NEVER be deleted by Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS. Instead, you will be responsible for making the necessary changes to keep your feature service schema matching the questions in your survey. To your example, if you add extra questions, Connect will not let you publish the survey again unless you add the corresponding fields in your feature service. You can for example start by publishing your survey first. This will create your initial feature service. Immediately after, you would take the URL of your newly created feature service and then you would set it as your submission_url. As described at the bottom of this blog post, we are working on improvements to the whole submission_url experience in our 1.10 release, which we tentatively release before the end of the year. If you are working with submission_url I would strongly recommend that you wait for the 1.10 release.
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11-17-2016
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Hi Finian. At this point it is not possible to use public surveys stored in Portal for ArcGIS. We will enable this functionality in upcoming releases.
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11-14-2016
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Hi Oscar. Do the paramedics fill out the same survey instance, say they work in the same shift and complete a single form together on one device, or do they complete their own survey instance? If completing the same survey instance, you could add a simple check like ${CityIDA}!=${CityIDB} in the constraint of the second CityID question. If completing different survey instances, you will not be able to ensure uniqueness because it is not possible at the moment to reference questions in separate forms, even if the forms are in the same device and populated by the same person. Is the City_Id always the same for a given paramedic, or can a paramedic select City_ID A one day and the following select B? That is, is there a 1:1 ratio between parademic and CityID If you have a 1:1 ratio, you got lucky as you could use the 'username' type of question to calculate the City_ID as well as the 'fullname' and 'preclassification' using pulldata. I am afraid you have a 1:M ratio but just in case. If the ratio is 1:M you will not be able to ensure uniqueness, or at least I cannot think of a way to do it.
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11-13-2016
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