Why you should use Survey 123, even if you don’t care about location.
By: Regan Hutson
Tags: Esri, GIS, Process Improvement, Data Collection Tools, Survey123

We stuck with Survey 123 and these are the key features that made it so valuable?

Lookup Tables- We were able to scan a barcode on the asset tag of each workstation to get the asset tag number of the computer. What we needed to configure the application was the computer’s full machine name however. With Survey 123, I was able to setup the survey to automatically query a report from our IT Department to connect the Asset Tag number with the computer’s machine name and populate that data in the survey.

This could be used both to add additional data to the survey results and to provide immediate feedback to the survey end users based on their input.

2. Dynamic Choice Lists- The facilities we needed to cover composed hundreds of thousands of square feet across a wide geographic region. For each computer we needed to know the building, floor, department and room it was in. Using selection lists would prevent typos and speed up data entry but once the user got to the department level the length of the list would become a hinderance. Survey 123 takes care of this problem by allowing you to filter the options in a choice list based on previous answers. So, when the team chose a department they could easily select from a short list of options that existed within the building and floor they had already chosen.

3. Question Relevance- Despite the improved process, there were still times that the team would need to return to a location. Either to find the laptop that went with an empty docking station or to get access to a locked area. Enabling question relevance allowed me to configure multiple workflows within the same survey. Users would first answer whether they needed to collect data or note an area for followup. Depending on the answer they would be presented only with questions relevant to that task.

4. Regular Expressions- There are a number of different data points barcoded on the workstations we were surveying. To ensure that we were getting the Asset Tag and not a Serial Number or other attribute, I added a constraint to the input field using a regular expression. This ensured that the data entered matched the standard Asset Tag format and would alert the end user if they accidentally scanned something different or got a bad scan due to a damaged tag.

Search “Regular Expressions” in the documentation below for more info.

5. Ecosystem- Because Survey 123 uploads data into a feature layer on ArcGIS Online or your ArcGIS Enterprise server, you then can use all the tools of the ESRI ecosystem to interact with the data. This became extremely valuable when late in the process our software vendor discovered that they needed the Gateway IP of each machine in addition to the machine name in order to have the data load properly. Since some machines move, it was critical that the IP information be current as of the day that the data was collected for the machine. I was able to use the ArcGIS API for Python to query a nightly network DNS report and populate the Gateway IP of all machines that were collected the previous day.

6. JavaScript Integration- Recently I was asked if this data collection process could be applied to another project at work. In the process of setting up a demo I came across a new feature in Survey 123 that was not available when I last worked with it heavily. You now have the ability to integrate JavaScript into your survey and have scripts run with question responses as inputs. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that I have not yet had the opportunity to explore.