Settings for home studio plans can be set up as a reference from another studio file to another, often referred to as the Central Data Model. The Central Data model holds all possible settings for all home plans in a builder’s suite of designs, communities or special zoning needs.

Settings from Higharc Studio plans can be inherited from the Template Studio File, or Central Data Model, to other studio files.

The diagram below demonstrates how settings are inherited in a hierarchy.

See Intro to Config: Adding Master Plans to a Community to learn more.

For updates to be seen lower in the hierarchy, the file must be published. For example,

To add a Document Reference to a file, the minimum required permissions on the reference file must be assigned as Viewer.

To add a reference file, follow these steps:

When there are updates published to the reference file, a banner with the word UPDATE will appear.

After a document reference has been added to a file, you will see it listed in the Home Inspector under Document References.

Click on the Document Reference to navigate to its Inspector. You will see the option to 'Import All' or you can expand the various categories to selectively import entities of interest.

Selecting entities to Import can be done at various levels of granularity.

Upon Import, your document referenced entities will include the Ref badge, indicating the entity is from another document. Most properties of these referenced entities are read-only.

Though read-only, these referenced entities can be used in the Active Document and can be referenced by other entities in the Active Document just like other non-document referenced entities.

In some circumstances, the Document Reference is useful as a seeding mechanism for adding entities to the Active Document. Rather than maintaining the link to the Document Reference, an entity or selection of entities is imported and then un-imported leaving local copies of the entities in the active document (most entities support this workflow, others do not leave local copies when un-imported).

For the entity types that leave local copies when un-imported, they now are editable local entities and their properties are editable (aka not readonly).

When some entity types are un-checked and subsequently un-imported, local copies are placed in the active document. Notice the display of duplicate id indicators in the Document Reference inspector. This indicates active document entities and un-imported document reference entities have the same ids. If the entities are re-imported from the document reference, they will overwrite the active document entities that were just copied locally by un-importing.

As long as the entities and all of their properties are the same, there will be no changes to the home upon re-import of the entities. In many cases, these duplicate id indicators can be ignored. But if any changes have been made to the active entity that aren’t present in the document reference entity a warning indicator will highlight the difference.

A warning indicator signals any differences between the active document entity and the document reference entity in order to prevent introducing unintended changes to the home during document reference import. Additionally, hovering over the indicator will provide a text summary of the differences between the active and reference documents.

In this instance, the active document has a detail drawing that is not present in the Drawing Catalog Settings in the document reference settings set.

There are two ways to mitigate this situation based on what is desired.

A warning modal will show, if a document reference is added to a file that was created by saving a version of the same document to file and importing it. It will indicate the number of id conflicts and the categories the conflicts are found in. Canceling the modal will abort adding the document reference.

Select 'Confirm' to proceed with adding the Document Reference. The categories and entities can be explored to determine where the ids conflict with the active document.

If overwriting the entities with conflicting ids is desired, 'Import All' can be used to import as normal. All active document entities will be overwritten.

Some categories will almost always be different in the active document than those in the document reference. It is recommended to check these entities and confirm that overwriting local changes doesn’t remove desired data from the local document.

For example, room layout document reference entities also manage any rooms and room hosted entities (annotation, props, windows, doors and casework), so any changes in these managed entities will cause an id conflict warning sign in the parent room layout.