Survey 123 crashing on iPad while taking photos

[KevinBrown10]

Survey 123 has been crashing and it appears to occur while collecting photographs from within the app and only if the photo is within a repeat.  Has anyone else experienced this?  We are using iPad Pros and Survey123 v1.10.25. 

I thought perhaps it was due to a specific form or specific iPad; however, I just created a new form that is very basic.  The photo question within the repeat only has one additional question asking for a photo description and was pushed to a brand new device.  A repeat is necessary because we need the flexibility to capture an unknown number of photos per survey entry.       

Just curious if others have 1) been successful at utilizing the photo feature within a repeat on an iPad and 2) what is the proper way to report this as a potential bug to ESRI.

Furthermore, when the app crashes, all entered survey information is lost.  What is the best way to suggest to ESRI about possibly implementing an auto-save feature?

Thanks

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Kevin,

The best way to report this as a bug would be to file this as a technical support ticket- go to http://support.esri.com .  We probably need a little more information to be able to isolate what is occurring.  

It is also a mechanism to provide the enhancement request on auto-saving; that being said, I'm noting this GeoNet post in the enhancement issue we have in the internal development log.

[MC2]

Hi we seem to be having a similar issue, although not inside a repeat, and on both iPhones & Android.

Accessing the camera to take a photo causes the app to crash completely, at least on first use.

Crashed on me after accessing the camera & going "back" without taking a photo (iOS 10.0, iPhone 5S). 

Crashed on 3-5 other people (various iOS & Android phones) at some point in the photo-capturing process.

As Kevin mentioned above, of course this wipes out everything the user had already entered without auto-saving anything, and they're now reluctant to use the app for their project (some are tech-averse & were worried about losing data - this unfortunately sort of confirmed their fears).

After deleting the app, installing the latest iOS update & reinstalling the survey, it didn't crash on me, but did still crash for other people. I gave permissions to access camera when prompted. I assume others did, but can't be sure. Sorry I don't have more details. 

Maybe a permissions issue (since it seemed to most consistently crash on first use), or maybe the delegate handling the user interaction isn't set at first, or isn't quite acting as expected to either cancel/dismiss the camera or store the photo?

Accessing the photo roll to select existing images is also extremely slow & makes the app unresponsive, but it didn't crash (this may be because my phone is too full of photos & it was trying to display a count of them all, but I still wonder if there's a way to not block the UI...?). 

Also sorry, I wasn't able to open a report ticket & don't have time to chat, so had to put this here.

Thanks as always for any help!!  

[JamesTedrick]

Hi MC,

Can you give me a sense of the form you are using?  If you can share the form, that would be great, but otherwise, how many questions does it have?  Repeat sections?  Constraints? Calculations? Relevants? Choice lists (number and length).  I'm trying to get a sense of the complexity of the form, which might point to the amount of memory the form takes up.

[MC2]

Hi James, 

    The survey has 24 questions total & is not very complex, I don't think. 

No repeats. No calculations. 

Only constraints limit 2 integer text boxes to 1 < . and . < 250.

About 5 'relevants' like (${aQuestion} != "" AND ${anotherQuestion} = "B") to hide conditional sections pending response to initial 2-3 questions.

There's 1 map, 1 photo, 1 Date, 8 short lists with < 5 items each, 1 longer list with ~100 items, and about 15 text boxes.

Removed other constraints & calculations to bound the geopoint values because it didn't work on the web app version.

Only issue seems to be the camera & trying to take a photo.  

Thanks for any help!

[Anonymous User]

Hi Kevin/MC,

Just an update to let you know that the Survey123 app has had several updates since 1.10 and we are currently at version 2.4. There have been many updates and bug fixes in 2.4.72 which address issues with attachments (camera and images from gallery) and other app crashes.

I would be interested to know if you are still experiencing crashes in 2.4.72 as per your original messages in this post?

Regards,

Phil.

[Anonymous User]

Hi Kevin/MC,

Following my reply a few days ago, further testing today on iOS devices, it appears upgrading to iOS11 may resolve out of memory issues when using the camera or adding attachments. Previously on low memory iPad Mini devices we saw crashes in iOS10 and iOS9, however once the same device was upgraded to iOS11 and using the same survey, the app no longer crashes.

If you can confirm the same with your devices, that is if you are able to upgrade to iOS11, that would be great.

Regards,

Phil.