Latest Contributions by IsmaelChivite

    The ArcGIS Survey123 February 2022 update is now available. This release includes great additions to the Survey123 web designer to help you visually create more powerful smart forms. The Survey123 field app includes massive improvements to make calculations faster and support for custom markup tools. All of that, and much more! Read on to learn what’s new: Survey123 web designer and web app Use your own web maps in a survey Have your survey automatically get the respondent’s location Use your own locators with the address and map questions Survey123 Connect and field app: Faster calculations and new calculation modes Markup photos, maps and diagrams with custom markup tool palettes New Media tab and Overview folder option Other enhancements and important release notes: Expanded report syntax Other release notes     Survey123 web designer and web app   The Survey123 web designer helps you visually create smart forms, right from a web browser. In recent updates we added support for the new Address question type, introduced calculations, and added options to permanently hide questions in your form. This release brings more enhancements to the Map and Address question types.   Use your own web maps in a survey   Up until this release, you could configure a default map for your survey. Well, kind of, as you could only choose a map already present in  your organization’s basemap gallery. Now, however, you can select any web map! Note that a new Edit option has been added to help you configure the contents of your map. You can select a map you own as well as other maps from your organization.   Have your survey automatically get the respondent’s location   Map questions now support various options to determine the default location. Use these options to specify the behavior of your map: Should the map automatically center when the survey is opened? Or when the user interacts with the map? What if instead the map should be centered at a predetermined location? Automatically centering the map when the form loads is something new for online surveys. Combined with calculations, it is a powerful option because it makes your smart forms location-aware. Say, for example, you create a survey to report issues in your city. Since you know where the user is, you can automatically populate questions such as city, postal code or address where the incident happens.   Use your own locators with the address and map questions   Many people may not know how to pinpoint the location of something in a map, but for sure they will now its address. We introduced the address question type in our previous release. It helps respondents complete an address as they type. To simplify data entry boost the quality of your data, it is good practice to configure address questions with your own locators. You can now easily do that right from the Survey123 designer.   If you are creating a web survey to collect information in your city, why would you use a locator with addresses from other places? Learn how to create your own locator, share it, and use it with your Survey123 address questions. Survey123 Connect and field app   Survey123 Connect is a desktop tool. With it, you can author the most sophisticated forms using an XLSForm spreadsheet. The Survey123 field app is available for iOS, Android and Windows devices.  It includes advanced options to work with your smart forms from the field, or the office. The new build numbers for Survey123 Connect and the field app are 3.14.256 and 3.14.237, respectively. Faster calculations and new calculation modes   Calculations in a smart form allow you to populate questions based on previously entered responses. The calculation execution in the Survey123 field app has been optimized to make your forms faster. You will appreciate the difference when working with very large forms. Additionally, starting with this release, you can specify three different calculation modes in your questions: Auto: The calculation is triggered if the question is empty or if it has not been previously modified by the user. This is the default mode and the only one available up until this release. Always: Auto-calculates the value, even if the user has already entered a value. Manual: Use this option if you want the user to trigger the calculation manually. The new calculation modes give you more flexibility to dictate the logic of your form.   Markup photos, maps and diagrams with custom markup tool palettes   Survey123 includes image annotation tools. With them, users can markup photos, diagrams and maps. We gave these tools an overhaul in late 2021. This update introduces the concept of custom annotation tool palettes.   While Survey123 comes with its own annotation tools, you may want to tailor the user experience, so it best fits your workflows. For example, if you are supporting an effort where you know users will markup in a photo the location of existing water and gas meters, you will want to create markup tools for these two features, and nothing else. Below are some examples of custom annotation tool palettes. Note that each of the tools has its own meaning. They are all categorized logically into separate groups. Custom annotation tools make image markup more intuitive, but they also help generate more consistent image annotations. Find more about custom annotation tools,  in our documentation and this blog post.     New media tab and overview folder option   Use the new Media tab in Survey123 Connect to quickly visualize the contents of the media folder for your survey, such as CSV files, custom annotation palettes, audio files and images.   On the Options tab, you will find a new switcher to enable or disable the Overview folder. The Overview folder is useful when you want users of the Survey123 field app to view all survey records in a single map or list. Other enhancements and important notes   Improved report syntax   Use new report syntax to display multiple records on a single map. You can also rotate photos!   Other release notes   As announced in May 2021, macOS installers for Survey123 Connect and Survey123 field app are no longer available with version 3.14. Access to the Survey123 field app and Connect source code in ArcGIS AppStudio is now available only upon request. Complete this form if you would like access. 3.14 will be the last version of the source code available. Image questions (with or without the draw or annotate appearance) will not allow you to browse for existing images in your device, unless you enable local image browsing. This can be done right from within Survey123 web designer as well as from Connect using method=browse in the body::esri:style column. More details in the Survey123 Tricks of the Trade: Photos blog. The next updates are planned for March 2022 and April 2022. If you want to get up to speed on new features coming, join the Survey123 Early Adopter Community.   Fixes   BUG-000144684 ArcGIS Survey123 field app shows duplicate choices for a select_one question with choices which contains integers only if the survey has another select_one question with more than 256 choices when the survey is updated on the device after republishing the survey BUG-000144253 The headings for a table-list appearance are not visible when repeats are applied on the groups in the ArcGIS Survey123 field app BUG-000143625 The select_one question type in ArcGIS Survey123 Connect or field app 3.13 populates the field domain (name) after selecting the field label (label) when the field domain is 10 or more digits BUG-000119569 In the Survey123 for ArcGIS Mobile App, SAML ADFS logins are cached, preventing a new user from signing in when a previous user signs out BUG-000143746 When using a geopoint question, ArcGIS Survey123 crashes on Android devices when an organization is configured with a custom geocoder Issues causing application crash with complex surveys: BUG-000138740, BUG-000125886 ,BUG-000133842, BUG-000133237,BUG-000128201, BUG-000126685, BUG-000125015, BUG-000108085, BUG-000111086 BUG-000144753 Blank survey responses submitted for nested repeats prevent reports from being generated in the ArcGIS Survey123 website when surveys are published to Portal and surveys are submitted from the ArcGIS Survey123 field app BUG-000140014 Thumbnails misalign on the ArcGIS Survey123 field app when the download list is refreshed BUG-000129066 Image is not loading in the Survey123 field app via dynamic URL creation using placeholders BUG-000127011 When using the Survey123 for ArcGIS field app, an image attachment disappears when the survey is edited from Outbox having a 'repeat' set with image question BUG-000128495 Substr() functions do not update to show the most recent selection when editing existing survey submissions from the Inbox which initially do not contain a response in the substr() dependent field BUG-000101479 Unpublished online surveys do not open in Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS BUG-000145342 Unable to generate a report in ArcGIS Survey123 if there are too many getValue expressions of an attachment in the if conditional statement. BUG-000145620 Querying a hosted feature layer created from ArcGIS Survey123 Connect returns a respectsDaylightSaving error message BUG-000145304 ArcGIS Survey123 does not capture the updated responses passed through the custom URL parameters when editing existing submissions BUG-000142188 When loading dates (MM/DD/YYYY) from the data taken from ArcGIS Survey123 website and ArcGIS Survey123 Connect labels sometimes work incorrectly, either failing to list Months (MM) or Years (YYYY) appropriately BUG-000143583 If there is no attachment outside the repeat or no other questions answered inside the repeat, the ArcGIS Survey123 website does not show the repeat's image attachments on the Individual Response pane for surveys hosted on versions of Portal for ArcGIS older than 10.8 BUG-000112346 The default latitude and longitude of a read-only geopoint question that captures devices location is zero when using link for a survey BUG-000142529 The ArcGIS Survey123 mobile app display issues with the language selector BUG-000143301 Creating the Set rule -function does not work properly in Survey123 when the Address -component is used in the survey before the Set rule -component BUG-000135434 ArcGIS Survey123 (On premise) post-installation within IE11 shows only The survey does not exist or is not accessible   ... 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  In this blog, you will learn about external choice lists. External choice lists  allow you to work with lists stored outside of your XLSForm document, as CSV files. When used appropriately, external choice lists can help you: Boost the performance of very large lists in the Survey123 field app Reuse a single list across multiple surveys Streamline updates to lists I will assume that you are already familiar with XLSForm and Survey123 Connect. When to use external choice lists?   Large lists: If your survey includes lists with more than a few thousand choices, it is generally a good idea to use external choice lists. They will give you a performance boost both in Survey123 Connect during the design process, as well as when your form is loaded in the Survey123 field app. When you add very large lists in the choices worksheet of your XLSForm, you will note that the form validation process in Survey123 Connect slows down. This is because the content of the choices worksheet needs to be processed and uploaded into ArcGIS before it can be validated. By moving your lists away from the choices worksheet into an external CSV file, the XLSForm validation process accelerates. On an average Windows machine, it takes Survey123 Connect about 3 seconds to process a list with 10,000 choices. If you move that list into a CSV file, it takes just over half a second.  A list with 100,000 records in the choices worksheet can take more than 1 minute to process. The same list stored as a CSV file will process in less than 1 second. The performance boost is also noticeable when you work with big lists in the Survey123 field app. Nobody likes to wait for a form to open!    Specifically, the very first time a survey is loaded into the Survey123 field app, indexes are built to optimize the form.  Indexes on very large lists can be built much more quickly from a CSV file than from the choices worksheet.  Indexes are only built once, when the form is opened for the first time on the device, but the time difference is substantial. If you use an external choice list in CSV format, the Survey123 field app will index it in less than a second even if you have many tens of thousands of records. I generally use external choice lists when: A list contains more than 500 choices. In this case, I put the list into its own CSV file. When the combined number of choices across all the lists I have in the choices worksheet is larger than 500. In this case, I take the larger lists I have away from the XLSForm file and save them as CSV files.   Shared lists and streamlined list updates: As you design more and more surveys, you will see yourself having to reuse lists across multiple XLSForms.   If items in the list change, updating the XLSForm designs across all  of your surveys can be time consuming and error prone. Not to mention that for your changes to take effect, you will also need to re-publish every survey. External choice lists bring clear advantages in this case: Replacing a CSV file is much easier than going into an XLSForm file an updating the contents of a worksheet.  Even better, it is possible to have your survey reference a CSV file stored in ArcGIS! This means that many surveys can point to a single master list. Whenever you change that list, all the surveys will reflect the change. As I will describe later, this is done through content linking. Should you then always use external choice lists? Not necessarily. I  bet all your Survey123 forms include a 'yes/no' list. That is not a good candidate for a master list in CSV format. For lists that do not change and have few options, the choices worksheet within your XLSForm is the best place. If you have a list that changes somewhat frequently, say once a month, or once a year, then using a linked external choice list is probably a good idea. This applies to surveys for the Survey123 field app as well as for web surveys. CSV items in ArcGIS can be updated manually, and programmatically. Check out this Python notebook that @ZacharySutherby put together to programmatically update CSV files in your ArcGIS organization using the ArcGIS API for Python. If you need to deal with a list that changes very frequently, such a daily or hourly, you may want to look at other alternatives such as dynamic lists. Dynamic lists are populated by querying an ArcGIS layer. Brett discusses their use in his Dynamic Choice Lists using Search Appearance blog post. How to create an external choice list External choice lists are stored as CSV files. Unlike the choices worksheet in your XLSForm, which can contain multiple lists in a single worksheet, a CSV file can only contain one list.  The rules to create the CSV file are: The filename cannot contain spaces. The name of the file, becomes the name of your list. You must include at least two columns: name and label (just like in the choices worksheet): The name column includes the choice codes. No special characters, spaces or duplicates allowed. The label will be used to present the choice to the user. In the screenshot below you can see a CSV file listing all Angiosperm families common in Brazil. External choice lists can support other standard XLSForm columns such as language, but not the media and image columns (as of May 2022).  The rules to use them are the same as for the choices worksheet in the XLSForm. If you want to use choice filters, you can also add extra columns, just like you would if you were working in the choices worksheet of your XLSForm. In the example below, the CSV includes a list of common plant species in Brazil, and their corresponding family. The family column has been added to support choice filters in the Survey123 form. As a general rule, you want to keep information in the CSV file to a minimum. If you do not need a column to support your survey, drop it from the CSV file. One last note: If you use Microsoft Excel to put together your CSV file, choose the CSV UTF-8 option when saving. This will avoid issues with special characters included in the labels of your choices.   How to use external choice lists in Survey123 Connect   To work with external choice lists in Survey123 Connect, copy them into your survey's media folder. If you click on the Files button in Survey123 Connect, it will take you there with a couple of clicks. You can store one or more CSV files within the media folder. Once you have the lists in the media folder you can reference them from your XLSForm design.   XLSForm basics   External choice lists are used with the select_one_from_file and select_mutliple_from_file question types. They are similar to a select_one and select_multiple, but: The Survey123 Standard and Advanced design templates do not include these question types. When  you expand the list of available question types, you will not see them. You need to type it manually in the type column. To indicate the list name, type the name of the CSV file including .csv at the end. Make sure the file is in your survey media folder and match the filename exactly. It is case sensitive! Important: External choices are commonly used for large lists. If that is the case, you should consider using either the autocomplete or minimal appearances.  If you don't Survey123 will attempt to render all your choices in the form. If you have many thousands... it will not be pretty!   If you ever see Connect display a list like below, unable to display the proper labels, make sure your CSV file includes a column called label.  It is common to get CSV lists from other systems lacking a label column. Always remember to rename one of the columns as the label!     A step by step guide   Creating the CSV files I downloaded a database of Brazilian plants from FigShare. Out of this database, I created a couple of CSVs, which you can find as attached to this article.  One CSV file for all the Angiosperm families, and a separate one for all the plant species. The original database looks like this: Note that the first column (ID) has unique values. There is one unique ID for every plant species. This makes it a perfect candidate to become the name column in the Survey123 external choice list.  For the label, I simply concatenated the Especie (species) and Genero (genus) columns. Since I was interested only on species, I used the Microsoft Excel remove duplicate function  to eliminate all plant subspecies and varieties.   After having the name and label columns with respectively, the plant IDs and their scientific name,  I removed all other columns to keep my CSV file as lightweight as possible. I removed all except the family column, which I wanted to use to build a choice filter. The Brazil_Species CSV file ended up with over 76,000 unique choices. To create the Brazil_Families CSV file I copied all the families into a new worksheet and then used the remove duplicate option to generate my list. I used the plant family values for both the name and label columns. As you have seen, I was not able to use the original database right away. I had to massage the data to comply with the strict requirements I described above in the How to create an external choice list section.  The original size of the database is over 20Mb. The size of two CSV files I created is around 3Mb. Again, you can find both files attached to this article. Copying the CSV files into the survey's media folder Open Survey123 Connect and sign in with your ArcGIS account Create a new survey using the Advanced template While in the design preview, click on the Files button from the left bar Navigate to the media folder and paste the Brazil_Species.csv and Brazil_Families.csv files Using the CSV lists in the form design Add a new row into the XLSForm Set the type to select_one_from_file Brazil_Families.csv Set the name to family Set the label to Plant Family Set the appearance to autocomplete or minimal Save the XLSForm design and let Survey123 Connect validate and display your form The list of plant families has barely over 200 choices. It is a very small list, but you got it working! The plant species list has more than 70,000 choices. Add a new row into the XLSForm Set the type to select_one_from_file Brazil_Species.csv Set the name to species Set the label to Plant Species Set the appearance to autocomplete Set the choice_filter column to family=${family} Save the XLSForm design and let Survey123 Connect validate and display your form Note that the list of species will be filtered based on the selected family  You can next publish your survey and try it in the Survey123 field app or in a web browser. Publish your survey Use the survey from the Survey123 field or web apps Next, we are going to upload the CSV files into ArcGIS and link them to the survey. In this way, our CSV files could be reused again and again across many surveys. And if we were to add new plant species, we would just need to update the master CSV items in ArcGIS! Uploading CSV files to ArcGIS In Survey123 Connect, click on the Files button and copy the path to the survey's media folder. This will help us later when we need to browse to the files to upload them into ArcGIS Using a web browser, sign in to ArcGIS Navigate to the Content tab Click on the New Item button as shown in the next screenshot Select the Brazil_Species file and upload it. Remember that  you should have the path to its directory already in your clipboard. In the New item dialog, make sure you don't create a hosted feature layer with the data in the CSV. We just want to upload the file Set the title, tags and other properties and Save. Share the new CSV item with the same groups you plan to share your survey with Repeat the process to also upload the Brazil_Families.csv file Linking the CSV items to your survey In Survey123 Connect, click on the Linked Content tab Click on the + Link Content button Select the Brazil_Species item and click OK Repeat to link the Brazil_Families item   Content linking does NOT require you to publish the form again. Once content has been linked, the Survey123 field and web apps will automatically check if the local copy of the content in the device needs to be refreshed or not. The check happens when the survey details page (the page where you see the Collect button) opens. Please note that no check is done if you bypass the survey details page. For example, no check will happen if you open the survey via app linking.   Programmatically updating CSV file items   CSV file items can be updated programmatically using a Python notebook. Check this sample written by Zach: https://github.com/Esri/Survey123-tools/tree/main/Update_CSV_Item   ... View more

  Do you want to try new features coming up in ArcGIS QuickCapture?  The Esri Holistic Testing Lab is hosting this week (Feb 17-18) a couple of remote sessions open to ArcGIS Early Adopters. We will cover new features coming in the March 2022 QuickCapture update: Enhancements to location sharing: Learn how to enable the new last-known-location-only mode and how to thematically render location sharing data. Enhanced map-review workflow: Do you want end users to review, and if necessary correct the location, new collected data using a map. Possible! Other enhancements to the QuickCapture designer and mobile app: More device variables, more built-in icons for your project, sort and search options in the app and more... The dates are: Thursday, Feb 17, 2022 9:00AM - 12:00PM (Pacific Standard Time) Friday, Feb 18, 2022 1:00PM - 4:00PM (Australian Eastern Standard Time) If you want to join, follow these steps: First join our QuickCapture Early Adopter program. You will need an Esri account for that. Complete this Registration form so we know you will be joining us for the event. During the event, we will share with you what is coming. You will be given access to the Beta software. We will ask you to do some hands-on exercises, use the software on your own and have an open discussion. It will be fun! Familiarity with ArcGIS is assumed. ... View more