Bruce,
the activation of the reference is by no means the correct way. First, this must even be done by the users (manually) if they like to work with your app. Second, you are 'activating' the reference which means your ACTIVE MODEL is no longer the one you started with. This might lead to many confusions and each change the user does ends up in the reference. This is a nice feature for small changes but not a solution for programmers use. Prefer the standard ways here (as Brian answered)
Michael