Concept: Plant style and plant data integration
Difficulty level: Advanced
Specific plant style parameters can be associated with botanical data. The botanical data comes from one of two sources.
Plant catalogs (recommended method): easily edited files containing plant data, separated by category
Plant database: a separate, standalone application (based on FileMaker) that manages plant data in a database
Choose whether to use the plant catalog or the database by Selecting the plant data source.
If desired, changes to the plant style data can also update the information in the plant catalog or database. For data to be exchanged, the plant styles must be associated with a corresponding plant from the catalog or database. This association is based on the botanical name of the plant.
The data exchange between the plant style and the catalog or database can flow both ways or not at all, depending on the following settings and actions.
Update the plant style parameters from the plant catalog or database by clicking Plant Catalog from the Plant Style dialog box (see Plant settings: Species and Data pane or Plant settings: More Data pane). Depending on the selected type of plant data source, either select a plant from a plant catalog or from the database.
When Update the Plant catalog with Vectorworks Plant style changes or Update the Plant Database with Vectorworks Plant style changes is selected in the Choose Plant Data Source dialog box, any changes made to the plant style are automatically updated in the associated plant catalog or database for matching plants.
Only the plant catalog/database where the plant originally came from is updated. Other catalogs/databases that might contain the same plant and data are not updated.
Deselect the option to keep the data in the plant catalog or database separate from plant style data changes.
When Update the Plant catalog with Vectorworks Plant style changes or Update the Plant Database with Vectorworks Plant style changes is deselected, the plant catalog or database can still be updated with plant style information by selecting the Landmark > Update Plant Data command. This command updates all matching plant catalog or database records from the corresponding plant styles in the file (see Updating plant data from Vectorworks). Online plant catalogs cannot be updated.
You can update all plant styles at once with current plant catalog or database information by selecting the Update Vectorworks Plant Styles command (see Updating plant styles with plant data).
If you're using a plant database file from a version of Vectorworks prior to 2018, the synchronization of images between the plant style and the plant database cannot occur even when using the Migration Manager during the version update, because the older plant database file does not include the new functionality. To fix this issue, export the records in the plant database with the File > Export Records plant database command. Then import the records into the plant database with the File > Import Records plant database command.
