Latest Contributions by BiosisGIS

We also have a lot of complaints about this, mainly around vegetation mapping and rapid flora/fauna observations. When collecting hundreds of polygons and points in a single day, an additional button press for every point/vertex really adds up. ... View more

We are an ecological consultancy where a significant part of our workflows involve digitising detailed vegetation polygons based on a combination of field observation and high resolution aerial imagery. Our botanists usually digitise the polygons in the field using Collector, but all of them have reported this is slower and more cumbersome using the point on target method in Field Maps. As fieldwork usually needs to be completed within tight timeframes, any loss of productivity in the field has significant knock on effects. We also do rapid field collection of individual flora and fauna observations. It is much more important for our field staff to be able to make a quick estimation of the location by touching on a map than to get a precise location as often hundreds of observations are made in a day. While the Collector Classic method of capturing polygons is preferable to the Field Maps method, it is not ideal as features that should have coincident boundaries need to have overlaps and gaps tidied up and rough edges smoothed out post fieldwork. This is a time consuming process for our GIS staff. Having the ability to freehand draw polygons like the markup in Field Maps using a stylus but with the auto-complete function available in the webapp builder edit widget to capture geometry into polygon layers would be ideal for us. It'd also be useful to have the ability to switch between the different methods of capture. We exclusively use Android tablets for data capture. We are in the process of updating the majority of our devices to the Samsung Galaxy SM-P610 model. It would be really helpful if some information could be provided on esri's current thinking on this, if similar changes have been considered for future Field Maps updated and a rough estimate of timeframes if they are. ... View more

Hi Nick, Similar to Etienne we are an ecological consultancy where a significant part of our workflows involve digitising detailed vegetation polygons based on a combination of field observation and high resolution aerial imagery. Our botanists usually digitise the polygons in the field using Collector, but all of them have reported this is slower and more cumbersome using the point on target method in Field Maps. Fieldwork usually needs to be completed within tight timeframes, any loss of productivity in the field has significant knock on effects. As mentioned by others above, we also do rapid field collection of individual flora and fauna observations. It is much more important for our field staff to be able to make a quick estimation of the location by touching on a map than to get a precise location as often hundreds of observations are made in a day. While the Collector Classic methods of capturing polygons is preferable to the Field Maps method, it is not ideal as features that should have coincident boundaries need to have overlaps and gaps tidied up and rough edges smoothed out post fieldwork. This is a time consuming process for our GIS staff. Having the ability to freehand draw polygons like the markup in Field Maps using a stylus but with the auto-complete function available in the webapp builder edit widget to capture geometry into polygon layers would be ideal for us. It'd also be useful to have the ability to switch between the different methods of capture. We exclusively use Android tablets for data capture. We are in the process of updating the majority of our devices to the Samsung Galaxy SM-P610 model. It would be really helpful if you could provide me some information on esri's current thinking on this, if similar changes have been considered for future Field Maps updated and a rough estimate of timeframes if they are. Kind regards, James. ... View more

Hi again Jake - I should also have noted the Esri has provided the relevant key so we have sorted the issue. ... View more

HI Jake I have forwarded your query and will get back to you.  Thanks ... View more

Thanks Jake - yes the date has expired - presumably we need Esri to provide a new keycode? This is frustrating for us to chase up as we should be up to date with our license fees, and would expect Esri to be proactive about keeping our portal open.  Any ideas about avoiding this in future.  I am putting expiry dates in my calendar and checking our other keys. ... View more

Thanks James. That did the trick. I did look into using regex initially but couldn't figure out how to use it for my purposes from the documentation. The two examples provided are very complex and so I found it difficult to decipher how it worked. Perhaps a couple of simpler examples in the documentation would assist newbies to its use like me? Cheers, James. ... View more

Perfect! Thanks Ismael. ... View more

I'm using the new aggregate functions to summarise values in a repeat and it seems to be working well. The issue I've come across is that if you are aggregating numeric values but have the field type set to 'calculate' or 'hidden' it treats the field as a string and concatenates the numbers rather than adding them. I want to hide around a dozen calculations in the repeat from the end user (it gets too cluttered). Is there any way to do this? I've tried using the int() function in the calculation and binding to the short esri field type but with the same result. Any suggestions? Cheers, James. ... View more

We've had this problem recently also. From searching on geonet and github it seems there are a range of possible causes. Ours turned out to be a problem with question naming. We had questions that had hyphens in the name. This is not an allowable character for fieldnames in ArcGIS, but Survey123 doesn't seem to pick that up as an error and allows the survey to be published, but when trying to sync a survey it gives the error 1003 operation rolled back.  Replacing hyphens with underscores in the questions names solved our problem. Hope that helps. James. ... View more

Hi Sunny, I have a bit of a clunky workaround. Instead of having your questions in a repeat, you have to duplicate them as many times in the main survey as you think there could be possible responses. So rather than having species name and count in a repeat I have Species1Name, Species1Count then Species2Name, Species2Count and so on up to a couple of dozen species. I then put relevant restrictions on each one so that the species 2 fields only appear if there are values for species 1. It then means you can use the count field in calculations, though it means you end up with a very long calculation that capture the values from all the fields. It also adds lots of fields to your main form and I find if any of the repeat fields have long choice lists (as my species field does) then the more iterations you add of a field looking up the long list, the slower the form is to run to the point where my form refuses to run after about 4 iterations of the species field which is looking up an external choice list of a couple of thousand choices. As I said, a bit clunky but it works if you don't need to have too many repeated records, too many fields in your repeats or too many choices for one of your fields in the repeat. Hope this helps, James. ... View more