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Plant reference database


Jean-Marc

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I just downloaded version 10.1, anticipating that at last, I might be able to begin editing and working with my plant database. Back in December and January, I had added an additional 4000 plants to the prd via the utility. Due to bugs in the prd, I have been unable to access or edit approximately 2000 of the new plant entries - ones which I think were created with the "duplicate" rather than "create new" button in the utility.

To my utter dismay, it would appear that the upgrade has not solved the problem. If I select one of these new plant entries, the last plant in the list is displayed. In other words, I am unable to select or edit approx. half of the new plants.

The one improvement in the prd is that it would appear I can now add new plants from within the prd (but this is slight consolation if I have to reenter 2000 plants).

Is there any way I can salvage the 2000+ plant entries that I cannot seem to access via the prd?

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Robert, I'm not sure what you mean by duplicates in the latin name field. I opened up the plant reference data in excel to see what was up. There are no exact duplicates in the latin name fields. There are, however, many plants that are cultivars of the same species (eg. Pinus strobus, Pinus strobus "nana", Pinus strobus "Pendula").

Please clarify. Thanks.

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I have gone through the document and deleted all the duplicates (and incidently, a couple of the duplicates came with the PRD). However, I am still having the same problem; when I select certain plants, I am provided data on the last plant in my list. The problem seems to occur with those plants that were created using the "duplicate" button in the Plant Database Utility.

Any other suggestions?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Here's the definitive way to determine if your PRD data has duplicates:

1. Open the VWL Plant Database Utility (I will assume this is where you have been editing your dB.)

2. From the Layout button (Upper left of the screen) choose "Find (free-form)".

3. Choose the command View as Table from the View menu.

4. Choose "Find Mode" from the View menu.

5. Click in the "Latin Name" field (left most).

6. From the "Symbols" menu at the left of the screen, choose "Duplicates". This will insert an exclamation point in your Latin Name find field.

7. Click the Find button at the left of the screen. If you get a message like, "No records match this find request," then you have no duplicates. Otherwise, the found records are duplicates in the Latin Name field.

PS. You are correct. There are 4 duplicated plants in the VWL database: Caltha palustris, Dahlia, Houttuynia cordata, and Iris setosa. I will look at getting these records properly merged or differentiated (as appropriate) for the next release.

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I've followed your directions, got rid of all the duplicates, and re:exported to the PRD. Unfortunately, the problem persists - the last plant on my list shows up when I select some of my new plant entries... I'm certain the problematic plants are those I created with the "duplicate" tab in the Utility; those created with the "new" tab are fine.

To answer your question, no, I am not on a Mac, but on a PC. Is the plant list not automatically saved in Mac ASCII format as required, or am I supposed to export my file in a special way?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

ASCII files created on both Win and Mac are fine. I can only assume you're having problems here because of corrupted data, the most likely example of which is problems with blank fields. The VWL Plant Utility, when exporting a data base file, inserts a hyphen in each blank field (this is what it's doing when it asks you to wait during export). If somehow this hyphen is missing in any record, the database is corrupt and you will see the effects you are experiencing. My advice is to open the ASCII file in Excel and look for the following:

-verify the number of rows is the same as the number in the A1 cell; and

-there should be no blank cells as noted above.

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I just cleaned up the data via excel. The A1 cell had the wrong number, which I corrected, and there were two columns with missing dashes, which I also corrected. I then did one last check to make sure there were no blanks.

Unfortunately, the same problem persists, last plant in my list shows up whenever I select any plant that I created with the duplicate button in the Utility.

Any other ideas?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

The problem appeared to lie with the VWL Plant Utility, which allows so-called "smart quotes" which for some obscure reason cause problems on the PC platform (but not the Mac).

We have entered this bug in our database; it is scheduled to be fixed in a future release.

I'd like to make the observation that, rather than entering every cultivar as a separate record in the datafile, you consider entering the available cultivars for a given species in one of the three user comments fields, and keeping just one record per species. This will reduce the size of your database and speed up performance of the Plant feature.

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