Customizing the Filemaker Vectorworks Plant Database

[reGenerate Design]

Hi there,

 

Does anyone out there offer customising the FileMaker VW Plant Database? I do a lot of ecological design work and want to be able to catalogue the plants I use and have it searchable in the VW Plant Database and need to use different fields. I'm already appropriating other available fields, but would like to extend this further and it would be awesome to just update the database for my needs. Or, if VW is going to abandon the FileMaker database in the future, is there a way to customise the built in Plant Database?

 

Thanks so much,

 

Adrian

[Scott Lebsack]

@reGenerate Design @Katarina Ollikainen and other users may have more insights about the plant database, there are many that use it extensively. My understanding is that Vectorworks will be moving away from the FileMaker Database, as it is no longer supported in the manner it was implemented. As a practicing Landscape Architect, my needs were likely different from yours, but I used Plant styles to hold my data. With Plant Styles it was easy to duplicate and tweak plants precisely for a project. I would then store all my Plant Styles in a single file where I could access them to add to new projects.

In addition to the Plant Styles, you can create custom worksheets to pull data from plants in a file and layout the data in a spreadsheet like format. One additional resource you may look at is adding custom records for data that doesn't have a "place" in the Plant Styles. You can pull this same record data into your custom worksheets alongside the data stored in the Plant Styles. Custom record formats are fairly easy to work with and should provide a lot of flexibility for adding data to plant styles.

I hope this is helpful? Have a good afternoon.

[Jeff Prince]

17 minutes ago, Scott Lebsack said:

@reGenerate Design @Katarina Ollikainen and other users may have more insights about the plant database, there are many that use it extensively. My understanding is that Vectorworks will be moving away from the FileMaker Database, as it is no longer supported in the manner it was implemented. As a practicing Landscape Architect, my needs were likely different from yours, but I used Plant styles to hold my data. With Plant Styles it was easy to duplicate and tweak plants precisely for a project. I would then store all my Plant Styles in a single file where I could access them to add to new projects.

In addition to the Plant Styles, you can create custom worksheets to pull data from plants in a file and layout the data in a spreadsheet like format. One additional resource you may look at is adding custom records for data that doesn't have a "place" in the Plant Styles. You can pull this same record data into your custom worksheets alongside the data stored in the Plant Styles. Custom record formats are fairly easy to work with and should provide a lot of flexibility for adding data to plant styles.

I hope this is helpful? Have a good afternoon.

 

The main problem with Vectowork's implementation of Plant Styles is the data is locked into the Vectorworks ecosystem, one which does not allow you to do the things Landscape Architects frequently do with plants... Illustrative plant booklets, project manuals, spec cut sheets, etc.  This is something database programs, Filemaker in particular, do a very nice job of.  If Vectorworks discontinues the plant database, I sure hope you guys make a tool that allows people to EASILY connect an outside database to populate a project with plants.  Why?  Because in a BIM workflow, there should be one source of truth.  Professionals have to do more than modeling and documentation for projects, so it makes sense for plant and product data to live in outside databases and be referenced in for the least amount of errors and greatest efficiency.