Schema Update Mystery

We had a need to add a couple of custom fields to the group schema. After much research, we managed to update the /etc/dirsrv/slapd-GFS-COM/schema/99user.ldif file with our new objectClass and attributes. We restarted the directory server and added the objectClass to groups in the GUI. Here's the mystery. We couldn't see the new attributes (using Apache Directory Studio to browse the tree). We gave up after fiddling with it for an hour or so because it was end of day Friday. When we picked back up on Monday, the attributes were magically there. Clearly we missed a step somewhere. Can anyone explain what we missed and now to properly update the schema? This is our Proof of Concept instance and I need to solidly document how to do this before we set up a production instance. Just saying magic happened, doesn't seem sufficient.

ipa --version
VERSION: 4.8.0, API_VERSION: 2.233
Running on RHEL 8.