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Landmark Plant Database Setup/Import


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Anyone out there able to offer some help on importing a catalogue of plants into VW Plants database.

I have imported an excel file catalogue from our local nursery, hoping that this would allow me to select plants in the "Get Plant Data" option. THis works but the prices and the schedule/container size data is not there....

I would like to be able to incorporate the prices and schedule size into the VW plant catalogue so still have all the other data ie. spread, height, zone etc.

If anyone has done this before and could help, would be great....

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Ok yeah did that but why don't some of the field show up when accessing the info from vectorworks? I mapped the 'price' field from the excel file to the 'VW Price' field in the Plant Database and yet when I access the info in VW the price field isn't there, and the size isn't in the schedule size!?

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Not all the fields that are in the database are exported back to Vectorworks when you create a plant list. Only those that you see in the 'Plant Data' tab of the 'Edit Plant Definition' dialog are there. So even if you imported the data correctly from your excel sheet, verify that they show in the database and create a new plant list, your price information does not get sent back out. This is why your price is not showing up back in Vectorworks.

The only workaround for this is to copy the price into one of the 3 comment fields which do get built into the plant lists, then grab that data and move it to the price on definition tab.

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ok Great :crazy: , doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of importing info to the database and using the plant data tool!! Would seem to be an obvious thing to be able to import price data from a nursery catalogue...

any plans to fix this and make the database useful?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

DukeLuke, Though I would agree having all the data from the database being fully transferred to the list we populate our plant objects with would be an ultimate goal, I would raise up a concern I would have about a price field being a requirement for the information in the database, because I would suspect your suppliers, like many others, would have multiple prices per plant species because of the various sizes they would provide. This would mean that your database would have to have 2-5 entries for many of the plants you would then consider. So, if you have a plant palette of 200-300 plants you usually would refer to, you would end up having 400-1500 records with mostly duplicate records and the only changing field being the price. My I recommendation would be that you place the price for each plant in their definitions and verify the price associates to the installed size differences. Keep those properly priced and sized plant objects as available plant symbols in a template file and pull from them each time you do a planting plan. Then the template file symbols get updated each time that supplier changes their prices, and you pull off the plants they no longer carry. The plant database can still be used as an informational source, as intended. If you are doing this as part of a design build workflow, then we should talk more directly on how to use the plant data in association with other estimation software available that takes Vw worksheet data exports and uses the supplier data to help build material takeoffs and proposals, etc.

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