Feature suggestion: View plant file from Journal

Hey all, maybe this has already been suggested, but I couldn't figure out how to search for it.

I think it would be great if I could view the Plantfile entry for a plant that I've added to my Journal. Since I'm a newbie and just looking at getting into gardening, I'm using the Journal to help me keep track of plants that work in my area, plants that I like, etc., that I find as I browse through the Plantfiles. But, when I go back to look at them again, I have to open two windows - one to look at my Journal, and the other to re-search in Plantfiles for the plant I saved. Sure would be convenient if I could just click on the plant in my Journal and go to the Plantfile entry for it!

Just my two cents! Doing a great job here. Thanks!

Valerie

For any new plants that you're adding to your journal, there's a feature in Plant Files where you can add a plant to your journal (search for the plant you want in PF, then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the entry and you'll see "add this plant to your journal" as one of the options. If you put the plants into your journal that way by importing them from PF, then when you view them in your journal there is a link to the PF entry. Unfortunately if you've already put all your stuff in your journal I'm not sure there's a way to create that link other than to create a new entry for the plant by importing from Plant Files. If you don't have a ton of other info on each plant in your journal this might not be a bad way to do things, but if you have a ton of entries it could be pretty painful! It would be nice if there was a feature where you could go back and add a link to plants that are already in your journal!

(note...there are some bugs in the importing feature...the most noteable one is that you can't import things into your default journal but only into journals that you've created. There has been some discussion of the importing process and fixes for problems that people have run into before in the DG Journals and Diaries forum so I recommend going there for help if you try this and have problems)

Okay, all of the plants I have in my journal, I put there by using the "put this plant in your Journal" link while looking through Plantfiles.

I think I just found the link you're mentioning - it's not on the Journal page, actually. I have to click on "View" and THEN at the bottom of that page, I get a link to the PF. Is that it?

That method only seems to work some of the time. I was looking through to see if all my entries had links to the PF file, and some didn't. So, I deleted them from my Journal, found the plant again in Plantfiles, and used the "put this plant in your Journal" function to add it back into my Journal.

But, still no PF link. Seems to work for some, but not others, with no discernable reason I could see. Could this be another bug?

I think it is another bug, but I've only found it on a very few plants out of the hundreds (actually more like a thousand) that I've put into my journals. Are you finding a lot of them? If you're seeing a lot of them, are you typing anything additional into the genus, species, cultivar, or common name fields in your journal entry? If you type stuff in any of those fields then the link to plant files gets lost (you can change location, date, status, comments without messing it up).

I wouldn't say a LOT, but several. Currently, I don't have any info in my journal, other than the plants I added through Plantfiles. Just collecting ideas at this point, so it shouldn't be there.

I'll chalk it up to a bug and not worry about it. Thanks for the help!

You might try going back in a couple weeks or a month and trying again with the plants that didn't work right--I've never gotten it to work by trying over again right at the same time, but I think I had a couple that didn't work when I first tried them, but then a few weeks (or maybe months?) later they worked fine. No idea what causes this though.