One of the most lengthy, tedious tasks associated with undertaking an ArcFM Fiber Manager™ implementation is the construction of Favorites. 

These Favorites are especially important for Fiber (as opposed to electric) because of the sheer quantity of related objects. 

For example a 144 count fiber cable may contain 156 related objects (12 buffer tubes + 144 strands).  There is at least one shortcut that may potentially reduce user error and save time. 

Schneider Electric has a sample database that contains several fiber cable Favorites.  An issue with using these Favorites is that even though their configuration is correct, their populated values may not be totally applicable and/or desirable to the telecommunications company. 

In the ArcFM™ System Favorites Manager, one will observe that the 144-count fiber cable populates the Status field as “Dark” (Figure 1).

If the administrator desires the value to be populated as “Lit”, there are three choices:

• Rebuild the Favorite from scratch
• Go into the Favorite and modify the value of each strand (Yeah, 144 times!)
• Export the Favorite, modify the XML, and import.

Since this blog is about time savings, the remainder outlines the methodology described in the later.  To modify a single (or multiple) value, conduct the following procedure:

• Create a temporary category (SSP in this example), and copy/paste the desired Favorite into it (Figure 2).

• Export the temporary Favorite Category as a XML.
• Open the Favorite in a text editor.
• Conduct a Find on the word “Dark”, and replace it with the word “Lit” as shown in Figure 3.

• Save the Favorite.
• Import back into the created temporary Favorite Category. 
• Rename and organize as necessary.
• Test by digitizing and verifying desired functionality (Figure 4).

So tell me.  Do you feel lucky, Punk?

Did this tip help?  Have any of your own to share?  We’d love to hear about it.  Let us know below in the comments!