Another version of the Plant Base 2 Beta is available for download from the website, 2.0.33.  I don’t talk much about each update, but this one is important as it is a significant step toward production release.

Two major functions are added: Extract and Import. Also there are extra printing options, other changes and quite a few bug fixes.

The Extract function is a rename of the old Archive in Plant Base 1. It does much the same thing – copies records to a new file, in database format so that it can be read by the Import. The records can either be all those that were added or changed by the user, or alternatively named  records from a list.

The Import is a very large and complicated part of the program, to read read-in and update records from either an Extract file or another complete Plant Base database.  This can be used to exchange data with other users and also provides the method of updating to new release versions of the database.  It will be essential for those existing users running the production release to migrate to the new Plant Base 2.  Currently the missing part is the file format conversion, but that’s on its way!

A new feature of the Import process, which did not exist in Plant Base 1, is an option to apply the deleted record log. Doing this gives a much closer synchronisation of content between two databases.  It is very similar to the old Sync program for the Mobile Edition, and may indeed completely replace it for the Andriod edition -still  in the pipeline.