Importing Lexical Items
Importing a file containing lexical items (i.e. a file with a .plx extension) into an existing lexicon can be a little more involved than importing an entire lexicon into your lexicon library because the program needs to know what to do if there's a data conflict. In order to understand what conflicts are possible, you need to know a little about the contents of a lexical item export file. In addition to lexical item data, an export file contains lexical type definitions for the items in the file. If there are nouns, verbs, and adverbs in the file then the definitions for those lexical types are also contained in the file. If nouns were the only lexical items exported then the file would only contain the lexical type definition for noun. The exact definition of a lexical type depends on the language being learned and how the creator of the original lexicon defined it. For example, some languages define nouns as having gender and some don't. Some languages conjugate verbs a certain way and others don't. Typically, language templates are used when creating a lexicon so users don't need to add or alter lexical types themselves. This means that two students who are learning the same language should usually be using the same lexical type definitions within their respective lexicons. However, this is not guaranteed, which is why lexical types have to be included in the export file. Geographic regions are also added to the export file if they are used by any of the exported lexical items.
What this all means is there are 3 types of data conflicts that can occur during import:
If a conflict occurs the program will ask you how it should be handled. It's quite possible that no conflicts will occur. Those that do should be simple enough to resolve, but in situations when one arises that you think shouldn't then you always have the option of canceling the entire import in which case your lexicon will not be modified. For example, if importing a file into your French lexicon you find that the lexical types being imported are not French then you probably want to cancel the import. Here, the export file probably contains lexical items for a language other than French and while importing, the program will prompt you before adding a new lexical type to your lexicon. At this point, you are given the option of canceling the whole import if you desire.
After any conflicts have been resolved and the import completed successfully, the program will show you all lexical items that were just imported. It does this by making visible the system theme entitled [Last Import], which is located near the top of the theme list just underneath the [Unassigned] theme. As the name suggests, [Last Import] will show you all lexical items that were added or modified by the last successful import. These lexical items will remain under this system theme until they are deleted from the lexicon or another import is done. If after examining the imported items you're no longer interested in seeing the [Last Import] theme then you can hide it by selecting the appropriate menu option underneath the View menu. Once hidden, you can always make it visible again by selecting the same menu option.