CU Referencing

In the past, any time you opened a design, the System CUs, System CU Favorites, and User CU Favorites would synch with the CUs held in your CU library (technically, those held in the System Table MM_CU_LIBRARY). The benefit was that if a change had been made to certain fields (listed below), then all the CUs would receive the updated values. The consequence, though, is that the application attempted to sync the fields every time, even if no changes had been made. This hurt performance.

Now, the administrator can make changes to certain CU fields within the CU Admin tool, and then choose when to push those changes throughout all the related CUs and CU Favorites. The application no longer has to perform the sync every time a design is opened.

TIP: Designer uses a combination of the following information to reference a CU. This combination will always be unique for each CU in the library: WMS Code + Table Name + Subtype.

The following fields are able to be automatically synched in this manner:

Name
Description
Available Work Functions
Units of Measure
CU Defining Attributes (CUDAs)

IMPORTANT: Any other fields not listed above are not synched. For example, all fields included for Extended Data are not synched. If you make changes to these fields in the CU Admin tool, you need to visit all favorites that incorporate those CUs and perform the changes there as well. If you are handling only a few CUs, then using the tool interfaces is likely sufficient. First, you would update the fields in the CU Admin tool. Then, you would use the ArcFM Favorites Manager to locate the favorites that contain the changed CUs. Finally, remove and re-add the changed CUs from each favorite. That triggers an update of the Extended Data and other non-synched fields. However, if you are updating numerous CUs, you can use the XML Export/Import to assist in making changes to the favorites in bulk, or you can use an ArcFM integration API or a custom tool to assist.

In sum, if you update one or more of the fields listed above for a CU within the CU Admin tool and then push those changes, those changes are reflected in any favorites that reference the CU. For fields not listed above (including Extended Data fields), read the “Important” note above for the optimal process to ensure data integrity. This functionality is integrated into Designer and requires no configuration.