IOS – iPad app for collecting door-to-door survey information

databaseiosipadsoftware-recommendation

I need to be able to develop a custom form so I can have workers go door to door and collect survey information. Think census workers, but geared towards the upcoming election.

While I could develop a custom app, I expect to have to customize it heavily for each area, and make changes to the forms throughout the process.

In order to control costs we're not going with 3G service, so all the form data has to be collected on the device and saved until it's uploaded via wifi network (or any other method) later.

Are there any apps that let me design my own custom fields for form entry, and save the data on the device?
Simple database apps with custom forms or similar?

If I had my wishlist, it would also:

Automatically download the latest collected data when in range of a network.
Update a standard database server directly (MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, other?).
Track the location the info was collected (difficult and imprecise, probably, since it's a wifi tablet only)
Allow hundreds of tablets to check in and upload to the central server at any time, including simultaneously
Prompts the survey recorder with a script – not just a form, but gives them what to say, what to ask, and leads them through a configurable tree of questions, some of which depend on previous questions answered. For instance once they indicate their political affiliation, it might skip questions not appropriate to save time.

Best Answer

The apps from FileMaker sound like they would be good candidates:

Bento (iPad & iPhone)

Use standalone or synchronize with Bento for Mac. Create and edit custom databases directly on iPhone or iPad or choose from 25 pre-designed templates.

and

FileMaker Go (iPad & iPhone, with FileMaker for Mac)

Create solutions using FileMaker Pro and access them on the iPhone and iPad using FileMaker Go.

_{Trivia: FileMaker is actually a subsidiary of Apple; they used to be Claris.}

Related Solutions

IOS – Quicksilver-like app for iPad

No. In short.

The longer answer: All apps in iOS are sandboxed, meaning they effectively have no permission to do anything other than that which they were written for, other than through specific exceptions through API calls to other parts of the OS etc as allowed. For example my Twitter app is allowed to access my contacts to use and set contact details as is deems fit. Many apps (in my case Instagram,Tweetbot and Youtube) are allowed to send tweets through the Twitter App, but in all these cases (or any case where one app access some data or functionality provided by a second app) this is not a system wide availability. Using said APIs an app can make portions of itself available to other apps, but unlike Quicksilver/Alfred/Launchbar on the Mac, this must explicitely be defined by the target app. So taking for example the "Due" app for iOS which is a reminders app, it has an API that will allow other apps to create reminders in it, but that is all that other apps are allowed to do, and in order to do so they must be aware of the Due API. As such the "Agenda" iOS calendar app has integrated the "Due" API, and is able to set a reminder in Due for an event created in Agenda. But it cannot search for existing reminders in Due, or just start Due (or close it) etc.

So in order for an app like QS to exist on IOS, it would need to incorportate the API of every other app that it might want to connect to, and be limited by the fact that a) not every app (in fact I'd say very very few) actually has an API, and b) even where they do, they are often tied down to very specific functionality.

A bit rambly, but I hope this answers your question.

Just got an upvote on this, and re-read, and there is more the the answer than when I first made it. There are a few apps these days that are trying to get closer to what the OP wanted, by effectively collecting and allowing the use of as many of these 3rd party APIs as possible in one place. One such ass is Launch Center which collates APIs for nearly 50 apps, allowing you to do all sorts of actions from a single place - it's no quicksilver replacement, but it is an effective way to get at particular app functions directly rather than having to open the app and navigate to the function manually. - 1 example, is using clipboard contents for all sorts of things - tweet using clipboard contents, new task from clipboard contents etc etc. Very useful.

IOS – Text editor for iPad 2

You might want to take a look at Michael Tsai's iPhone text editor's comparison. It's not specifically for iPad, but summarizes (and he keeps it more or less updated). You have links to all the apps he mentions and a nice formatted table with the "features" each editor has or lacks.

He specifically added iPad support in the linked version of the entry:

I’ve added rows for tracking iPad

And of course, at the time of writing this…

WriteUp, still my preferred editor, syncs faster with Dropbox than before and now supports .taskpaper files.

_{Bear in mind that Michael updates the entry every now and then. I've linked to version six, but for the sake of this AskExchange entry, you should check if there aren't new ones. Use a google search like this. If you don't know what google is, you can try this other link. ;)}