User managed methods
A method can be specified as "user managed". A user managed method isn't updated, i.e. missing attributes are not added, when the an interface is refreshed. This is, typically, applied to custom Get and Set methods used to read or write a particular subset of the attributes of an entity.
In this example we have an entity Document exposed using the IDocument interface. Furthermore, suppose that IDocument contains a custom set method, SetDocumentAuthor. This method set the value of the Author attribute without affecting any other attribute.
To assure that we can continue to extend and develop IDocument without changing the behaviour of SetDocumentAuthor the method is specified as user managed by setting the UserManaged property for the method.
The Document entity is then extended by adding an Edited date attribute to keep track of when the document was last changed.
The IDocument interface contains a quite a few methods. Most of them returning, or operating on, all of the attributes in Document. To add support for the Edited attribute to these methods we refresh the interface. This is done by right-clicking IDocument and selecting Refresh from the popup menu. The signature of the SetDocumentAuthor method now remains unchanged
If the SetDocumentAuthor method hadn't been flagged as user managed the refresh operation would have added all missing attributes, i.e. given the method its default signature.
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