Plant Partner Plug-in Issues

[Hugh Chapman]

The Plant Partner plug-in is key to enabling us to move over to VW for planting design.

 

I’m currently testing the plug-in and finding that it is very clunky/confusing/inefficient/problematic to the point of being unusable.

 

 

A general inefficiency with the way the plug-in works (inconvenient but not a show stopper):

 

It appears to be necessary to create Plant Instance Objects for each species (and specification if more than one spec is required for a particular species) before using the plug-in to match data to these PIOs. The only way I know how to do this in VW2025 is to right click>duplicate in the Resource Manager - not an efficient process.

 

It would be more efficient if the plug-in itself enabled the creation of new PIOs, ideally with the option for the user to select a single symbol which all plants in the Plant Partner schedule would then be created using.

 

Will the Plant Styles Manager coming in VW2026 enable this process to be streamlined?

 

 

Specific issues I'm experiencing (and which make the plug-in pretty much unusable):

 

1) I understand that the PP plug-in is should automatically match incoming plant data with PIOs with the same name in the active VW document. I'm finding that this functionality is unreliable - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Possibly this has something to do with whether the PIOs in the active document exactly match the currently selected schedule group (same species, nothing extra) but I'd need to test this further to confirm.

 

2) If I need to manually match PP data with PIOs in the active document because of (1), I frequently find that the plug-in attaches the data to the wrong PIOs. At best this creates an annoying mess to try to sort out in the Resource Manager by renaming PIOs. But if the plug-in attaches PP data to PIOs which are already part of our planting design this messes up planting plans & schedules - very bad news!

 

 

I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing a trick/doing something wrong here, but it feels like there are some significant issues with the Plant Partner plug-in.

 

Can anyone advise?

 

 

cc @Katarina Ollikainen @Marketa Hermova

 

 

 

 

Edited September 3 by Hugh Chapman

[Hugh Chapman]

With much hacking about and a phone call to Plant Partner HQ I have found that following these steps in this order is the way to make the plug-in work reliably:

 

1) Select a plant species in the menu on the left. But DO NOT click in the 'For Matching' column to add a tick yet.

 

 

2) Unless the plug-in has found the correct PIO in the active document (it does sometimes but more often doesn't in my experience) - Click the 'Data Matching' box in the centre column to activate the option to Select Existing Plant Style via the Resource Browser.

 

3) Click the down arrow to access the Resource Browser

 

 

4) Select the PIO you want to link Plant Partner data to. I find it best to have PIOs named correctly in the Resource Manager but I think the plug-in can take care of re-naming PIOs via the other options in the centre 'Selected Plant Style Options' column.

 

 

 

5) ONLY THEN click next to the species you want to attach the data from in the left-hand column

 

 

 

That's it.

 

Repeat these steps to link PP data to multiple PIOs then click OK to close the plug-in.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 3 by Hugh Chapman

[Hugh Chapman]

Whilst I'm pleased to have figured out the correct order of operations to get the plug-in working reliably, my feeling is that the way the plug-in has been designed is non-intuitive and enables more ways to do it the wrong way than to do it the right way. I think the plug-in needs further work to improve the user experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hugh Chapman]

I encountered another apparently serious limitation with the Plant Partner plug-in today.

 

I needed to adjust the specification of a number of plants in our planting design.

 

After updating the spec in Plant Partner, I was unable to match this updated spec to Plant PIOs in my VW file because these PIOs were already matched and so aren't visible/available in the PP plug-in.

 

Does anyone know a way around this issue?

 

There doesn't appear to be a way to directly edit PP plant data in VW outside the PP plug-in?

 

Is there a way to 'unlink' Plant PIOs in order to make them available to be 're-linked' with updated PP plant spec info?

 

 

 

 

Edited September 9 by Hugh Chapman