Hello Luis
The route refresh capability and the soft reconfiguration feature are two different operations and are configured differently. Soft reset, or soft reconfiguration, stores all the information received from BGP neighbours in a separate table before the reset occurs. It works well, but it requires more memory, since an entire table is maintained for each BGP neighbour. More about this can be found at the BGP Soft Reconfiguration Lesson. To perform a route refresh, simply use the clear ip bgp command as you normally would.
Route refresh is enabled by default on all Cisco BGP routers, so it doesn’t need to actually be enabled or configured. More about how it works can be found in the BGP Route Refresh Capability lesson.
As mentioned before, route refresh is enabled by default. If you disable it, then when you apply the clear ip bgp command, a hard reset will take place.
Note here that the soft-reconfig inbound command is not involved in the route refresh feature of BGP, but in the soft reconfiguration feature. This command actually enables the soft reconfiguration feature, essentially telling the router to save the routing information from that particular neighbour in a new table called the adj-RIB-in table so that when a BGP session is cleared, that information will remain. Note that the information in this table is unmodified, meaning that it does not include any changes that may have been made by route maps that may be configured. In other words, this table shows the information as it appears in the neighbour’s BGP table.
Now you can use the show ip bgp neighbors <ip address of neighbor> received-routes command to see that table, but you can also get that information without the received-routes keyword. In such a case, any modifications made would not be shown. This is shown in much more detail in the BGP Soft Reconfiguration lesson.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz