When sketching dozens of similar features with many identical attributes - such as a neighborhood's worth of meters with the same manufacturer, install date, etc. - it can be easy to forget to change the attributes that differ. If a feature has a Location ID, Meter Number, Premise Address, or Customer Number attribute, this "distinctive attribute" - which may or may not be unique - may need to be set manually for each new feature as the value is not randomly generated but must correspond to an identification system beyond the GIS (e.g. the town's street grid, or the billing system's customer account numbering).
To ensure that a user doesn't accidentally create a neighborhood of new meters all billed to the same customer, an administrator should set the attribute's Reset After Create property to Yes:
- In ArcCatalog, right-click the feature class and choose ArcFM Properties Manager.
- In the Properties Manager dialog, on the Field Info tab, select the field.
- In the lower portion of the dialog, from the Reset After Create drop-down choose Yes.
- If the value is required, also set the Allow NULL Values drop-down to No.
From now on, immediately after a user sketches one of these features the distinctive attribute's value on the ArcFM Attribute Editor Targets tab will be restored to NULL.
If the user then sketches a second feature of this type, it will have no value for the distinctive attribute, thus avoiding assignment of a wrong value. If the administrator set Allow NULL Values to No, then the user will not be able to sketch a second feature successfully until he or she enters a value on the Targets tab for the distinctive attribute. All other attributes will keep their Targets tab settings no matter how many features are sketched.
