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What's New in Survey123 for ArcGIS (April 2018)

Survey123 for ArcGIS is a simple, yet powerful form-centric data gathering solution. With Survey123, you can easily:

  1. Design and publish smart forms into ArcGIS. Smart forms leverage a rich collection of question types (location, checklists, signatures, barcode scanning, smart-skeching, repeated sections, groups, pages, notes…)
  2. Create and update existing ArcGIS features using smart forms from the web, and through native mobile and desktop applications.
  3. Use Survey123 built-in reporting tools or other apps in the ArcGIS platform to display and analyze the results of your data gathering efforts.

We are pleased to announce a new update to Survey123 for ArcGIS. With version 2.7, we include numerous enhancements and bug fixes. Here are the highlights:

What is new in Survey123’s Web Designer?

Survey123’s web designer allows you to visually design smart forms right  from your web browser.  With every update, web designer is growing in functionality, incorporating new types of questions, more layout options and better rules.

Signatures: Starting with this update, you can add signature questions to your forms.  We added support for signatures in Survey123 Connect back in April 2015, but not until this update you could add them from web designer. Signature questions present a small drawing pad that end users can use to leave a signature either with a stylus or their finger.

Signature questions are supported in both web forms as well as the Survey123 field app.  Signatures are stored as attachments in ArcGIS.

Better rules: Rules in web designer are used to control the visibility of questions based on previous responses.  Using rules, you can dramatically simplify the end user data capture  experience and better control user input. Up until this update you could define rules on top of single choice questions.  Now rules are also supported with the following question types: dropdown, likert and rating.

 

Autocomplete: The new autocomplete setting applies to dropdown questions and is particularly useful when working with long lists of choices.  Start typing, and the list of choices in your list will be filtered…

Horizontal Compact Appearance: Arranging choices in a list horizontally can save end-users from having to scroll up and down the form. With the new horizontal compact appearance, you will be able to squeeze more choices horizontally. This appearance applies to single and multiple choice questions (checklists).

Date questions: Date questions have been enhanced in Web Designer so you can control if the calendar control should let users define a complete date (Year, Month and Day), or simply the year or the year and the month.  The calendar control will always store a full date (including day, month and year), but being able to control the user experience in this manner makes your forms more intuitive to end users.

Survey123 Web Forms

Survey123 Web Forms allow capturing data with smart forms from a web browser. In this update, we introduced several fixes, performance improvements and dramatically improved the user experience working with IE11.

As with every update, we introduced multiple bug fixes in Web Designer and Web Forms:

 

 

What is new Survey123 Field App and Connect?

Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS is a desktop tool used to author sophisticated smart forms using the XLSForm specification. Survey123 Connect is supported for Windows 7,8.1, 10, Mac and Ubuntu Linux.  The Survey123 Field App is available in the Apple, Google Play and Amazon stores as well as for Window, Mac and Ubuntu Linux platforms.

 

Version 2.7 of the Survey123 field app and Connect is available across all supported platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Ubuntu Linux) and comes with a good set of enhancements and fixes. Much of this work is driven by our interaction with all of you through our Survey123 Geonet Group and Esri Technical Support. I will start describing the enhancements:

Among the many bug fixes included in this update, I want to highlight the following:

Looking Ahead:

Looking at next steps beyond 2.7, we have already a handful of projects that have made sufficient progress as to be shared in a near-term road map. Our next major release will be 3.0, which we envision shipping around July 2018.   If needed, we may squeeze 2.8 and 2.9 as maintenance releases with critical fixes, but 3.0 in July will be the update with the most relevant new features, of which I want to highlight:

 

 

A lot in the plate as  you can see for 3.0. Our focus however it is not going to deviate from listening carefully to all your feedback through our Survey123 GeoNet Group, so keep your questions and suggestions coming!

 

There are many other ideas in our backlog including survey pages, support for polygons and lines, on-premises setup of all components of Survey123 and many other enhancements which remain as high priority in our list, but will see the light after the 3.0 release.

Learn More:

About the author

Ismael Chivite joined Esri in 2002. A geographer by training, he loves helping people leverage GIS to improve the way they work. As a Senior Product Manager, Ismael is always looking for ideas to create new and improve existing Esri products. Outside working hours: Legos, rock climbing, Romanesque architecture and jamon iberico. On occasion, he enjoys jamon during working hours too.

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