What's new in ArcGIS Survey123 (May 2022)

With ArcGIS Survey123 you can build beautiful forms to collect data from the web, desktop and mobile devices.  Survey123 forms support a rich set of question types including everything from basic text, addresses, dates, numbers, lists and photos to more advanced inputs such as signatures, documents, selection grids, markup, barcodes, sliders, likert scales and many more.

The May 2022 update to ArcGIS Survey123 is now available. This release includes focused fixes and exciting new features in the Survey123 web designer and XLSForm support.  Read on to learn what’s new!

Survey123 web designer

With the ArcGIS Survey123 web designer you can easily create forms, right from a web browser. No code skills are necessary: drag and drop questions into your design and visually configure the look and feel and behavior of your form. Once published, you can share your forms for use from the Survey123 web, mobile and desktop apps.

Minimum map zoom level for drawing tools

A new option in the map question type allows you to specify the minimum zoom level required before the drawing tools are active. This is useful when you want to make sure respondents zoom-in close enough before they set a location or draw on the map.

The minimum map zoom level is specifically designed for web surveys. It will not be honored in the field app.

Calculation enhancements

Calculations help you populate survey questions with previously entered form data. With this update, calculations let you gather information about the signed-in user (first and last name, username and email) and the client (user agent) used to complete the form.

When collecting this type of information, hide your calculated questions from the user’s view. Choose the ‘Hide from survey ‘ option in your question configuration.

Style survey links in social media (in Beta)

Social media is a great way to give your public surveys more visibility.  Survey123 now supports the Open Graph protocol. This lets social media sites retrieve your survey’s thumbnail and description. With that, an eye-catching social media link card can be automatically created.

As shown above, you can now quickly set the title, description, and thumbnail of your survey right from within the Survey123 web designer. Creating more attractive links in social media has never been easier!  At the moment, this feature is in Beta although we have made it available for you so you can start trying it out.

Accessible PDF output (PDF/A)

Starting with this release, the Survey123 report service generates PDF/A outputs.

Survey123 Connect and XLSForm

Survey123 Connect is an advanced smart form authoring desktop tool. When using Survey123 Connect you define the questions, behavior and look and feel of your form using an XLSForm document. Connect will help you preview and test your survey before publishing, and also work with advanced Survey123 capabilities such as offline maps, multilingual surveys, editing workflows, custom JavaScript functions, and more.

Extended pulldata(“@property”) function

The pulldata(“@property”) function is not new, but this update adds some additional options to help you gather information about the device and user collecting data. New properties include:

• User information: The username property retrieves the ArcGIS username used to complete a form. You can also now also retrieve the user’s email and first and last names, as well as their full name.
• Device, app and survey information: New properties include OS (operating system), deviceModel, appVersion, surveyName, and userAgent. Use these properties to learn more about the device, Survey123 application and survey used to submit data into ArcGIS.

You can check out all the supported properties in the Device and user properties help topic.

Return Easting and Northing UTM values with submeter precision

You can now extract UTM Northing and Easting values to centimeter precision. The syntax looks like this, where 0.01 represents the desired precision:

pulldata(“@geopoint”, ${location}, “UTM.easting”, 0.01) Returns UTM easting with centimeter precision

pulldata(“@geopoint”, ${location}, “UTM.easting”, 1) Returns UTM easting with meter precision

Minimum map zoom level to capture geometry

Using the minCaptureZoomLevel property in the body::esri:style column of a geopoint, geoshape or geotrace question, you can define the map zoom level at which the drawing tools will become available. This is useful when you want end users to zoom in close enough before they can start defining the location or shape of an event in the map.

This property is only honored by the Survey123 web app.

Additions to the Survey123 Connect community design gallery

Survey123 Connect includes a live collection of survey designs shared by the Survey123 community.  These Community designs can be used as inspiration for your own designs or as a starting point. New designs included with this update:

• Job Safety Observations: Use it to document at-risk behaviors on a work site. This survey demonstrates the use of groups, the table-list appearance and how to dynamically score and summarize data entered in the survey using HTML.
• FDA Food Inspection Form: This design is inspired in the US FDA Form 3-A Food Establishment Report template. Grid layout, dynamic scoring and the text geocode appearance are used in this design.
• Gas Technology Institute: GTI has made available 25 new designs that can be used by natural gas utilities to collect, report and share authoritative information internally to oversee field operations. You can find more information about all their designs in the GTI/OT Gas Survey123 Gallery.

Fixes

• BUG-000148749 Images in Survey 123 field app doesn’t show up intermittently while it is seen in Survey 123 website
• BUG-000148675 Polygons shift after ending the edit session of a map question in ArcGIS Survey 123 App on Samsung Galaxy Tab A8
• BUG-000147370 Unable to edit submitted records of a survey form created from the ArcGIS Survey123 website in the ArcGIS Survey123 Field app after updating to the latest version
• BUG-000148477 ArcGIS Survey123 field app for iOS crashes periodically when selecting images from the attached image gallery if there is a large number of images attached to the survey
• BUG-000147381 Unable to update a hosted feature layer view to include newly added fields when the parent hosted feature layer is created with ArcGIS Survey123 Connect
• ENH-000143506 Requesting the ability to load decimal values for UTM coordinates obtained using the pulldata(@geopoint) function for Survey123 forms in the ArcGIS Survey123 mobile app

What’s coming next

This is the last planned update to version 3.14. With the June update the build numbers will be increased to 3.15 and it will be followed with a first update before the Esri UC 2022 in July.  Some of the 3.15 features in the works include:

• CAPTCHA support for web surveys.
• Set the filename of signature, audio, and photo files using an XLSForm expression.
• Optimizations to the audio question type to help you record longer audio files.
• pulldata(“@layer”): A new XLSForm function to help you query feature layers and tables without requiring the use of custom JavaScript functions.
• New streaming tools for the Survey123 field app.

The above and more features  are available for beta testing through our Survey123 Early Adopter website.