Survey123 Offline Maps

[JAVIERVARA_SANZ]

We've been working with Survey123 for quite a bit and were happy to see it supported TPKs. However, rendering and performance of large TPKs, overall, isn't really good, which doesn't help much when trying to take advantage of this powerful functionality.

The ESRI Support Team replied to our question stating that Survey123 is not a map centric application and that the best work around is to link Collector and Survey123 for this purpose, which actually sounds like a great idea, other than I still haven't been able to populate information within Survey123 and bring the results back in Collector when selecting the same point.

The real question is why Survey123 supports TPKs for offline use when these perform so poorly.

I'll appreciate any help or suggestions in this regard.

Thanks.

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Javier,

Thanks for the feedback.  To better understand what the specific issue with TPKs file & Survey123 are, can I ask for a little more detail:

- How large a TPK are you deploying (MB, approximate area of extent)?  What detail level does the TPK go to? 

- Can you provide more details on how you deploy the TPK files?  Are they being placed on an SD card?  

- What is the performance difference between Survey123 and Collector with the same tile package?

Thanks,

James

[JAVIERVARA_SANZ]

Hi James.

Thanks for your reply.

Answers to your questions provided below:

TPK FILE SIZE:

Anywhere from 0.1 to 41.1 Gb.

TPK EXTENT:

Anywhere from 6 to 54 million acres.

TPK DEPLOYMENT:

Collector: Directly deployed through iTunes into the Collector folder

Survey123: Loaded to …\ArcGIS\My Surveys\Maps using iFunbox (IOS) or any File Manager APK (Android).

Haven’t been able to test anything with SD cards at this time.

PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE:

Excellent with Collector for all TPKs. No issues whatsoever with fast rendering (pan, zoom in/out) in Windows desktop and any mobile device (tablet/smartphone) or operating system (IOS, Android).

Very variable with Collector. Slow to poor performance overall, with better results in Windows desktop. IOS tablets work OK with small size TPKs, but still very limited (a user will get tired of waiting for tiles to load one at a time). Very poor performance in smartphones.

FYI, testing devices include Dell Precision M6800 (WINDOWS10, Intel Core i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10Hz), Samsung Galaxy S6, iPad Pro, and LGV10.

I’m also wondering why Collector and Survey won’t store TPKs in the same folder, which will help saving storage in mobile devices and tablets.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need any additional information.

[JamesTedrick]

Thanks Javier,

This provides us some parameters we can test with.

On the Collector and Survey123 storing in the same location, we can look into that.  There might be some issues due to application sandboxing.

[JAVIERVARA_SANZ]

Hi James.

I wanted to follow up on this particular thread and ask you if there have been any particular updates since the User Conference. We are still struggling with the TPK performance in Survey123 and not sure if it’ll be something ESRI will address in the near future.

We are currently trying to support emergency response for natural disasters with Survey123, but currently unable to rely in the application unless we have a quick way to deploy and seamlessly use our own TPK files.

Thanks.

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Javier,

We're not able to reproduce the performance issues that you are reporting.  Is it possible that you could share one of the TPKs that present this issue?

[JAVIERVARA_SANZ]

Good morning James.

Thanks for getting back with me.

Use the following link<https://my.syncplicity.com/share/qk3pcv1ocvhqqcc/TestTPK> to access a TPK that I´ve just created for the Bryan-College Station area in Texas. The TPK is a little over 5 Gb and it doesn´t render pretty well on my iPad.

As a reminder, the TPKs we need to use have the following characteristics:

FILE SIZE: Anywhere from 0.1 to 41.1 Gb

EXTENT: Anywhere from 6 to 54 million acres.

FYI, I’ve tried several of the larger TPKs as well with the same results.

I’ll look forward to your reply.

[JamesTedrick]

Hi Javier,

I've tried multiple times to download the TPK without success.  Can I ask you to e-mail me directly so that we can set up a sharing location that works for both of (Esri has access to box.net) - jtedrick AT esri.com

[SteveRichards4]

Hi,

I have been able to replicate this issue.

I generated a 650mb .tpk using ArcGIS Pro and loaded it onto Samsung Galaxy s2, it is rather slow to render when compared to the standard maps that come with Survey123.

Steve

[Th_re_B_Christensen]

I agree with the comment above, it would be much better if Collector, Survey123, and the other Esri mobile apps could point to one TPK file in iOS.

~TC