Printing Blank Survey Forms

RachaelHurd · ‎05-03-2017

Anyone have a good/efficient way to print the forms from Survey123 (with a Portal for ArcGIS implemenation)? We are just starting to use Survey123 and every single group we have shown it to wants to have a PDF of the survey questions so that if they want to they can print it. We found a pretty inelegant work around using the .webform file that Survey123 Connect creates when you publish your survey, notepad, and some powershell but it certainly isn't what I would call pretty or all that efficient. I am wondering if anyone else has any experience with this?

Anonymous User · ‎05-03-2017

If you have ArcGIS Server, then you might wan to look into this piece of software - PDFtk - The PDF Toolkit. We do not have ArcGIS server in house and I have had to craft a way to produce PDF files based on the FGDB that we download from our ArcGIS Online account. I have devised two separate methods and they are not straight forward. Please keep in mind that I have limited resources; no ArcGIS Server, and not a lot of LARGE database experience.

The first was through the ESRI "Report File" that will allow you to style a sheet based on text boxes(these would contain the text of your questions) and data fields (these would pull data from your tables or feature tables from within the downloaded survey that represent the answers). It takes a lot of patience and practice to get these to run smoothly, but well worth it once it does run. On our largest project we created around 1400 datasheets from a single Feature class in under a minute.

The other method would be to use a mail merge method with a fill-able PDF file. Essentially you would download your survey into Excel or FGDB and then you would need to create a PDF form that has fill-able fields. These fields would need to have the same exact schema as your survey data. Meaning, if your question contains a text answer, then the field within the fill-able PDF would need to be a text field also. After establishing the fill-able PDF file you would have to walk through the steps of completing a mail merge. Not the easiest thing to do. Mail merge using an Excel spreadsheet - Word

There could be easier ways, but we were able to build a series of Standardized FGDB schema's that we utilize for our field surveys. Once the project is completed, we then download and process the data; with a suite of ESRI tools we built, and then run the ESRI (.rlf) reports on the processed FGDB files to produce the PDF files we need.

Eventually, we will get to the stage of having a single tool that will download, store, process the data, and then push out PDF files into our project folders.

I hope this helps out.

RachaelHurd · ‎05-04-2017

Mike,

Thanks for info on how you work with the survey data! We do have a server (required for Portal) so I will have to look into the PDKtk program. As of right now our teams only want blank forms (not the resulting survey responses) in PDF format. But this information will be great if a team requests print outs of their responses.

DougBrowning · ‎05-09-2017

I use data driven pages to kick out PDFs. It has been working well just a pain to build the layout in ArcMap.

See this post for the code

https://community.esri.com/message/586285#586285

DougBrowning · ‎07-22-2022

I have a use case now where there is a group of stakeholders all on site going down the form. They all want to see the questions as they go. Most of these people have no device, and even if they did, no service. They will not be filling out the form they just want to look at it. So this is not a report but a blank copy that needs to look just like the form.

I cannot find a way to do it. Any report writer I have to recreate a long form, and even then it does not actually look like 123. I totally get a report writer for a completed form but for a blank it would be nice to have 123 connect give me basically a screen shot looking print out. For now I think I am going to have to take a simple screen shot of each page.

I try to be really modern and never print anything but they got me on this one. It is a solid use case.

thanks