There are two forms of refresh, that of a Collection and that of a symbol whose immediate relatives have been explored.
If a Collection that has had Explorer Objects and/or Relationship reports run against it is selected, the Edit menu and right button symbol menu Refresh Collection is made available. When activated, it removes all the symbols in the Collection that were placed there as a result of the running of the reports and then runs the reports again. System Architect maintains an ordered list of reports that have been run against each Collection. As each report is run, if it is already in the list, it is removed from the list. Then it is added to the end of the list. When a Collection is refreshed, the reports are run in the order that they represented in the list.
If a symbol whose immediate relatives have been explored is selected, the Edit menu and right button symbol menu Refresh selected symbol and its successors is made available. When activated, it finds the set of immediate relatives and compares it with the relatives already on the diagram. The manner of comparison and the actions taken are intended to highlight any changes that have taken place therefore:
•If an object is still immediately related, it is left as-is with the Relationship line between it and the refreshed symbol.
•If an object is no longer related, it is left as-is, but the Relationship line is removed.
•If an object no longer exists, both it and its Relationship line are removed.
•If an object is newly related and there is a Group symbol associated with the refreshed symbol, it is included in that Group symbol's inventory.
•If an object is newly related and there is no Group symbol associated with the refreshed symbol, a Group symbol is created and the new relative is included in that Group symbol's inventory.
If one or more of the immediate relatives themselves had been explored, or if the Group symbol associated with the refreshed symbol had been expanded, the refreshing process is iterated for those symbols and so on until all the explorations and expansions derived from the original symbol have been refreshed.