Valentine's Day Update
Our Valentine’s Day release is here. One week ahead of time! Let’s have a look at what is new:
Performance! The Survey123 app should load your surveys much faster now. The new version number is 1.2.49 and is available in the Google Play, Apple and Windows app stores. The performance boost also applies to the desktop: Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. You should be able to create now surveys with hundreds of questions and have them loaded in no more than a few seconds. Average surveys with 20 to 30 questions should load instantly.
Having the many Surveys you have shared with us has been key to get this straight. We noticed that some of you created surveys which used exactly the same relevant expression for many (say 5, 10 even 15) questions. With this update you will see a significant performance boost in these cases, but you can double the effect if you group all of these questions together into a group and apply the relevant expression only to the group. In this way, you reduce the computation needed to load the survey: you reduce loading time and save battery.
We also saw some surveys with very long choice lists. Remember that it is always faster to display long choice lists using the minimal appearance. In some extreme cases we have seen choice lists with over 300 items. The winner in this category had a choice list with over 40 thousand elements. We want to handle these situations better. First, in the next update you will see even faster drop-downs. We are also exploring how to best provide auto-suggest capabilities, so people do not need to handle ridiculously big drop-downs.
Fixes to Sharing & Download Data in survey123.esri.com: Many of you told us that sharing surveys and downloading their results through the survey123.esri.com web site was brittle. This turned out to be much harder than we thought but things should be much better now. We had to make some deep changes in the format of Surveys to get this sorted. For this reason, you will need to upgrade your Surveys. Do not worry, even if you don't your surveys will still work well with the new and old versions of the app. And if you upgrade your surveys, absolutely nothing should break.
To upgrade your survey, you will need to download the latest version of Survey123 Connect for ArcGIS. Connect will detect if the surveys in your local computer need to be upgraded and show a warning in the Survey Gallery, like in the screenshot below.
To upgrade, simply tap on the Survey and then click on the Upgrade button. This process will essentially make a call to your ArcGIS Online or Portal for ArcGIS to replace the format of your Form item. Once a Survey has been updated, sharing from the web site should work smoothly.
Map Preview in iOS: This fix is specific to iOS devices (iPhones and iPads). The Map Preview is now showing again.
We are now working on our next update, which is scheduled for the International Women's Day on March 8. As usual, we try to prioritize our work based on user feedback so keep your comments coming!
The Survey123 for ArcGIS Team.