Thank you James. I've also noticed a major problem when I do create a tpk file using the Share As option using all levels. I need to cache down to the building level as we are doing damage assessments and must see the buildings on our aerials. We also need to be able to see our parcels and addresses so the person who is doing the damage assessment can reference them on the map. We need the base map disconnected because we have areas in our county that do not have service ever, and if there was a major disaster, chances are there won't be service in many other areas. My tpk file is 35GB. I was not able to publish my survey if I put this file in the media folder and I can understand that...pushing 35GB over the internet would be an issue.
So I moved the tpk file to my media folder in Survey123 Connect and set my default map for the survey to it. Before publishing, I removed the tpk file. In this way, it published my survey to ArcGISOnline but didn't try to upload the actual tpk file.
When someone downloads the survey, it's still pointing to the tpk file as the default map and I can manually move the tpk into the media folder of the survey.
However, when I use the survey, the map is extremely slow, To the point where it draws one tile, then waits for 10 - 20 seconds, then draws another tile etc. I'm assuming that since it's using a tpk file, it is having to expand it first in memory before it can access each tile that I need. Since the file is so large, this is what is causing the slow down, is it not? I realize that Survey 1-2-3 only works with tpk files but to make this actually work the way it should (which SHOULD be faster than accessing it on the web), are there any plans to have Survey 1-2-3 work with the actual tiles? In this way, I would be able to export the tiles from the tpk once which should make it work a lot faster.
What I would really like to see is that I can have a survey that works both offline and online with both the feature layer and the basemap. ESRI makes it seem like this works because if you ask them if it works offline they will tell you yes it does. And technically speaking, they are right. The feature layer does work offline and I can plot points as needed whether I am connected or not. But practically speaking, it doesn't work because if I have no basemap to use a reference when I'm disconnected, how can I possibly know where I want to put the point? In most cases for a damage assessment, just getting my current lat/long won't work unless I'm standing on the site of the building. That's all well and good, but what if the building is no longer there??? This happened in Louisana where houses just floated away.