Survey123 Webhooks with FME Flow Automations and trigger of the Survey123 Report REST API to generate a PDF report

​@sashal

Hi, ​@dannymensah26 . I don’t know your exact environment information/needs, but here are some ideas:

For your proposed orchestration, it sounds like you want it to be:

1. User submits a Survey
2. Webhook is triggered upon submission
3. Report generation

For 3. Report Generation step - You can use Survey123 Feature Reports with the ArcGIS Python API but it sounds like your preferred method is they REST API. This is also possible. I just downloaded the Survey123ReportGetter to get a jumpstart and would suggest you do the same. You can edit the custom tool and see what is going on underneath (see the httpCaller parameters, etc). I was able to test this tool successfully using for Survey123 in ArcGIS Online. Once developed, you would publish to FME Flow (so you have a webhook to trigger it). You will need to expose parameters so that you can dynamically run the tool with input from the Survey123 submission (I have not yet prototyped this part, but if you want to trigger the report to generate dynamically for each submission, you have to pipe that survey info into the FME Flow workspace).

For 2. Webhook is triggered upon submission - You can create a  webhook on the Survey123 feature layer (item settings menu). You can make it trigger by the desired event, such as FeaturesCreated, then populate the webhook recieverURL (this will be the FME Flow Webhook and likely an Automation with a trigger set to webhook specifically). The FME Automation will need to be authored like: 1. Webhook Trigger (Survey123 Feature Service Webhook) → Survey feature details are extracted from the payload → Survey feature details dynamically added to run the Report Generation workspace. 

Let me know if this helps. If I am able to prototype fully, I will let you know!

Scratch what I said about dynamically pulling in feature info from payload directly into the workspace - it looks like the ArcGIS Feature Service webhook does not include the id of the feature edited. You would have to get that from the changesURL. I think you could add this extraction process upstream in your Report Generation workspace.

Another option to consider here would be to track which survey feature has had a report generated. This would be a nice feature in case web traffic is interrupted during the webhook trigger event. I have done this in the past, creating a flag field (ReportGenerated?) in the survey feature layer. Once the report is generated, I just have FME update the survey feature layer to turn the flag to Y.