Managing Unions as Shared Items

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The Manage Unions dialog contains Union items that you can share with others. Message Analyzer provides a simple way to expose Union items to others on your team for sharing purposes, or to retrieve Union items that others have shared. You can manage your Union assets in the Manage Union dialog, which is accessible as an item in the Unions drop-down list on the global Message Analyzer Tools menu. From this dialog, you can Import or Export a Union asset collection Library containing one or more Unions that you select. Any Union Library that you export is saved as a *.asset file with a name that you specify, and any Union Library that you import can only be of the same type. In addition, you can store a Union Library on a user-configured file share or a feed that you create in the Message Analyzer sharing infrastructure.

Working with Union Libraries

To create a Union asset collection Library for export, you simply select the specific Unions or categories containing one or more Unions in the Manage Union dialog that you want to include in the Library. After you select Unions and click the Export button, the Save Library dialog displays, in which you can specify Title, Description, Author, and Organization information before you Save the Library in a chosen location.

To import a Union Library, click the Import button in the Manage Union dialog and navigate to the directory location where the Union asset file is stored. When you open the file, you are prompted by the Select Items to Import dialog to choose the Union items you want to import. You also have the option to specify the Category in which to import the Library items.

The Manage Unions dialog also enables you to modify any Union that displays in the My Items category of the dialog list. You can access the modification commands by right-clicking any Union in the dialog to display a context menu that contains the Edit, Create a Copy, and Delete commands. If you Delete a Union in the My Items category of the Manage Unions dialog, obviously that Union will not be available to include in an export Library. If you decide to Edit a Union in the My Items category from the dialog, or Create a Copy and edit the Union copy, and you save it, then only the edited version of the Union is available to include in a Library export. If a user that is running a different Message Analyzer instance imports the Library, the Union assets that it contains will be new entities on their computer and will take effect immediately, although it is still possible that there could be a collision with an existing Union name. However, any modifications that you made to a Union in the current Message Analyzer instance take effect only after a Message Analyzer restart.

Sharing Unions on a File Share

You can share Union items directly with others by using the Export feature in the Manage Union dialog to save one or more Union items to a designated file share. You can also use the Import feature in the same dialog to access Union items that have been shared by others in a similar manner.

Sharing Unions Through a User Feed

You can also share your Union items through a user feed that you configure in the Message Analyzer Sharing Infrastructure from the Settings tab of the Asset Manager dialog, which is accessible from the global Message Analyzer Tools menu. You can specify a feed name and location in the Add Feed Location dialog, which is accessible by clicking the Add New Feed button on the Settings tab. Thereafter, you can use the Export feature of the Manage Union dialog to post your Library of Union assets to the feed so that others can access them on the Message Analyzer Downloads tab of the Asset Manager dialog. As the asset publisher, if you update your existing Union items or add others to your collection, you can make them available to team members or other consumers through the configured feed, where they can view, synchronize with, and download your collection items. However, to enable others to synchronize with your item collection updates, you will need to perform some manual configuration, as described in Manual Item Update Synchronization.

Accessing the Union Assets Collection

Unions are contained in an asset package named Message Analyzer Correlations on the Downloads tab of the Asset Manager dialog. You can either auto sync the package for periodic updates that occur automatically, or you can download the package from the Downloads tab of the Asset Manager, at which time the auto-sync status is canceled. However, after you download, you still have the option to auto-sync again later to synchronize your Message Analyzer installation for future updates to this asset package.

Important

The Message Analyzer Correlations asset collection is installed by default with Message Analyzer, so it is unnecessary to download the collection whenever you start Message Analyzer. But if it is the first time you have started Message Analyzer, you are presented with a Welcome dialog that provides you with the choice to opt in or out of automatic updates. If you choose to opt in to auto-syncing updates, then all Message Analyzer asset collections are automatically set to the auto-sync state, including the Message Analyzer Correlations asset collection, and no further action is required.

However, if you opted out, you still have the option to automatically receive periodic collection updates later by setting the Offline mode to Online on the Downloads tab of the Asset Manager and clicking the Sync All Displayed Items button, which auto-syncs all asset collections, or you can set individual collections to the auto-sync state on the Downloads tab as you require them. To do this, click the download icon to the right of the collection on the Downloads tab and select the Automatically sync item collection updates when available option in the Item Download Options dialog.

More Information
To learn more about using the common Manage <AssetType> dialog to share and manage your Unions, see the Managing User Libraries topic.
To learn more about the Sharing Infrastructure, downloading asset collections, and auto-syncing asset collection updates, see the Sharing Infrastructure and Managing Asset Collection Downloads and Updates topics.