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Going for the gold: Custom Entities

Rob Blau

March 18, 2009 23:09

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This feature would greatly enhance how scalable our Shotgun setup becomes over time.  I would like to be able to create custom entity types that behave just like the built in entities, but with no special handling what so ever

I'm finding myself using the Type field on entities to switch between things that they are trying to represent, and triggering visibility of fields based off of that.  For example, I'd like an entity for a Storyboard.  There are fields on the entity that make sense for Storyboards, but not for all files, and there are many views where I want to see files where I don't want to see storyboards and vice verse.  There are no views where I want to mix Storyboards with other types of files.  Right now I add a Storyboard type to file, add the fields I want and then proceed to go to every page showing files and filtering out Storyboards, then configuring Storyboard views.

If I could just create a Storyboard Entity type based off of the File Entity, then I'd be good to go.

-r

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7 comments

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  Don Parker March 19, 2009 07:02

  Hi Rob, we have this one on our list as ticket 4204, but it is not yet scheduled in a release.  One thing we are considering in the short term is to make a set of, say, 10 generic entities that you can rename and repurpose at will.  However, we had not been thinking about doing this for the file entity which is "special".  We'll have to think a bit about this one.  What other entities would you want?

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  Mike Romey March 19, 2009 19:50

  Please, Please, Please!

  Tired of bastardizing entities not intended to be basterdized and running out of free enetities to bastardize.  If you could put these generic entities in a scheduled release it would help out so much. 

  Consider People  and Groups as well.  We use people for host data and groups for render pools and it becomes a bit of a cluster dealing with both within their corresponding entities.

  -Romey

   

   

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  Rob Blau March 19, 2009 22:25

  10 generic entities would definitely help, and if needed we could manage some of the 'special' features that the built-in entities provide ourselves.  The auto-thumbnail feature of attachments is nice, but that seems to be broken for us currently so even for the Storyboards, I'm just explicitly setting the thumbnail on them... so I don't think there is anything 'special' that we're using... just want another specific thing that we can restrict links to, hang fields off of, and create tabs/pages for.
  
  Longer term I think it would be GREAT if you can make some of the special code that deals with specific entity types more generic.  I think that every entity field restricted to a cut item deserves duration and cut summaries (for example).  With things like that and calculated fields (to sum time logs for example), we'd be much better equipped to have generic entities behave exactly how we want via configuration rather than new features.
  
  -r

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  Mark Visser April 08, 2009 16:00

  Custom entities would be great. We're new to Shotgun, but already I'm trying to figure out how to bastardize the Shot entity so we can stick animation cycles in there.

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  Don Parker April 17, 2009 10:06

  Hey guys, we went ahead and added 10 new generic entities to the 1.7 release, so you can rename them and use them any way you like.  You can turn them on and rename them in your site prefs:  shotgun.*/preferences

  
  This is a short term fix, as we know you need to build your own.

  
  Mark, let us know if you want to talk about what you're trying to do with animation cycles.  Maybe we can help.

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  Mark Visser April 24, 2009 13:16

  Excellent! Just noticed that the display name is formatted as "Custom Entity 01 Name":

   

  <img src="http://imgur.com/1h.png" alt="Hosted by imgur.com" />

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  Don Parker May 26, 2009 08:48

  Hi Mark, you can edit that first column name by going to the fields page in the admin section.  Click on the pencil icon for that field to rename it.  We have a ticket to do this automatically when you rename an entity, and to allow you to do that from the column itself on any list page like the other fields.