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Latest Version per Shot, etc.

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Andy Geers
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I'm pretty sure this one is on your roadmap somehow, but I cannot tell you the number of times I get asked about this one: people constantly want to be able to pull up a list of versions which just shows you the latest version per shot. Currently the only way they can do this is pull up a list of all versions, group by shot, and then order within group by date. What they really want is to say "Group by shot" and then only show the first result for each group, in a flattened out list view without the annoying group headers.

 

It's not just versions, either - we have scanned background plates for each shot, and sometimes they want to show the most recent scan per shot. You get the idea.

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54 comments

  • 0
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    Paul Hudson

    We still come across needing the 'Option 2' functionality quite often as well.

    I still think it goes most easily and flexibly into the Advanced Grouping menu.  i.e.  filter by Versions with 'comp' in the name, Group by Shot and here's where you set the new option to Only Display Top N Rows in the Grouping...  then sort by Date Created DESC and  BAM  the Holy Grail Latest Comp page!

    I think behind the scenes in a Postgres Database this is a solution:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1124603/grouped-limit-in-postgresql-show-the-first-n-rows-for-each-group

     

    And should only take a small GUI change in the Advanced Grouping dialog.  

     

    This definitely is a top feature request for us and many others seem interested, so curious if someone from Shotgun can speak up on the status of this?  (And is it more complicated than I'm envisioning... hahaha probably! )

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hey guys,

    Apologies for leaving this one hanging for so long. This is clearly a very popular request. I have suspicions that it is going to be a big feature, but we haven't dusted it off lately so things may have changed. I did a quick brainstorm with the team here and we came up with a design that I think comes close to what you're after:

    5-3_show_latest_from_grid.jpg

    The idea is that you could perform a filter on the page that only show the last 'x' records based on any given field. So in this case, I'm showing only the latest Version per Link (Shot, Asset, etc).

    What do you guys think? We'll need to find out how complex this would be in engineering terms, so I'm going to find out and report back.

    Thanks for your patience, and let me know if this spurs any other ideas.

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • 0
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    Hugh Macdonald

    Hi Ben,

     

    This is definitely one of the use-cases of what I was after, but I can definitely see times when just showing it by latest (is this latest created, latest updated?) wouldn't necessarily be wanted - I would certainly prefer something where I could say "show the first W records with the same X sorted by Y in direction Z" (so yours would be "show the first 1 record with the same Link sorted by created_at in direction descending".

     

    Once the back end for what you're suggesting is in place, I wouldn't imagine that making the field to be sorting by selectable would be a massive additional feature?

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    That's right, Hugh...we're wondering if we can assume that's the most common, the support something more advanced in a v2. Can you give me some real-world cases where you'd do that? It'll help when we're designing this out.

    I forgot to mention, some of this functionality is supported in Screening Room.

    1) Go to "All Versions" in the browser

    2) Choose "Most recent only" from the History options

    You'll now just see the latest Version per Shot, like this, which you could then filter down by Pipeline Step, artist, etc, using the Filter Panel on the right:

    screening_room_latest.png

  • 0
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    Hugh Macdonald

    Hi Ben,

     

    I think that you're right - it certainly would be the most common. My concern would be, though, that with v1 done, we may never see v2!

     

    One use case is actually something that we experienced a while back which was when our pipeline created multiple versions at once, it wouldn't create them in the right order, so, sorted by creation time, I might see:

     

    v001

    v002

    v003

    v005

    v004

     

    In this case, I'd want to sort them by version number. This use-case is obviously based on something that is a bug at our end, but it's the first thing that came to mind. I'll have a think and see if I can come up with other places I'd want to use that.

     

    The other thing that I've realised is that I can certainly see places where I'd want to group them by more than one field. So I may want to see the latest version from each department for each shot. When Grouping, this is certainly possible, but with what you're suggesting, you'd only be able to select one field.

     

    One other thing - with what you're proposing, if there is a filter, that filter would need to be applied before the selection is made. So if I filtered by, say, department, I'd want to see the latest from that department, not the latest from any department that is then discounted when it doesn't match the filter.

  • 0
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    Paul Hudson

    Hi Ben,

    Another real-world example:  After setting up some Filters and Grouping Options I sometimes find I am only interested in the First record or maybe the top 3 records per Grouping.  This most often happens with Versions.  For example, A page that shows all Versions of all Beauty Passes for a sequence.  This page is grouped by Lighting Scene and then Pass.  Currently, I get all Versions which gets cumbersome to browse through when we have 50 versions of 200 passes.

    That came from this thread: https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/387903-grouping-option-collapse-records-max-display-records

     

    Also, and I'm quoting myself from earlier in this thread, but...

    I still think this feature goes most easily and flexibly into the Advanced Grouping menu.  i.e.  filter by Versions with 'comp' in the name, Group by Shot and here's where you set the new option to Only Display Top N Rows in the Grouping...  then sort by Date Created DESC and  BAM  the Holy Grail Latest Comp page!

    Curious if that isn't viable...  seems like a more natural extension of an already existing feature.

     

    Thanks for starting the discussion back up!

     

     

    And I had also made a similar feature request in this thread:  https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/387903-grouping-option-collapse-records-max-display-records

     

  • 0
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    Hugh Macdonald

    What Paul is describing is what I always envisaged this as - just an extra option in the Group menu saying "only show first X records". That way, the grouping could be as nested as existing groups, and it would show the first X records based on whatever sorting the page happened to be set to.

     

    The group headers could also show the same thing that they do when they overlap the end of a page (so something like "bunny_010_0010 (2 of 56)")

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hey Hugh and Patrick,

    Something like this?

    nested_grouping.jpg

     

    Default would be to show "All" records in a group, but you could override that to be a lesser number, like 1. It would definitely make grouping more advanced, but I guess that's why we call it advanced grouping in the first place! ;)

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • 0
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    Hugh Macdonald

    That looks pretty much exactly what I was imagining, so yes!

     

    Personally, I think you'd only want that at the bottom of the advanced grouping rather than once per group level.

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    > Personally, I think you'd only want that at the bottom of the advanced grouping rather than once per group level.

    Ah, so you don't need to show a different number of records per grouping level? That can be one value that pertains to all groups?

  • 0
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    Hugh Macdonald

    Not sure quite what you mean... I would want the upper grouping levels to show all sub-groups, and then it to only restrict the number of records at the lowest group level.

     

    So, let's say we're grouping Versions by Sequence and Shot:

     

    A

    A_A : Shows 1 Version

    A_B : Shows 1 Version

    A_C : Shows 1 Version

    B

    B_A : Shows 1 Version

    B_B : Shows 1 Version

    B_C : Shows 1 Version

    C

    C_A : Shows 1 Version

    C_B : Shows 1 Version

    C_C : Shows 1 Version

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    (doh) momentary mind blip. What you said makes total sense now that I've finished my morning coffee. Thanks for the extra info, Hugh! I report back as soon as I know more about the implementation details on this.

  • 0
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    Paul Hudson

    Hi Ben/Hugh,

    Just wanted to confirm the last few replies are right on track.  Hugh has got it!  It is applied to the end result of all grouping... so just one setting at the bottom is good.

    Maybe by default it is unchecked and greyed out...  Then when you turn it on there's an integer field that defaults to 1... but allows you to type in any number. 

  • 0
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    Hugh Macdonald

    Thanks guys - it definitely feels as thought it's moving along the track that I was always hoping for - looking forward to seeing where it ends up!

  • 0
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    Sean McAlear

    Hi Everyone,

    Checking in to see if there's been any movement on this recently, this is something we would absolutely love.

    Thanks

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hi Sean,

    We haven't begun the release where this feature is plan yet, but we're hoping to in the next couple weeks. I plan on updating this list when we a WIP to show. Stay tuned!

    Cheers,
    Ben

     

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hey everyone,

    We started this in engineering last week and I have an update. Our first attempt to build this followed Paul Hudson's recommendation. We tried to let users group by any field, then sort by any field, then optionally choose to display the "x" top results. After spending a few days doing a spike on this approach, we learned that taking the general approach is going to be quite a lot of work. Without going into too much detail, the complicated bits of this involve getting this to work with paging (so groups don't get split between pages if you're only showing 200 results), making it fast (refreshing a page using this style grouping will take more time to load the bigger the dataset, and Version is often the largest dataset for most of our clients), and a few other small things.

    So, I'd like to propose another option and get your thoughts. I re-read all the comments in this thread and it seems like the dominant request here is to show the latest Version per Shot (or Asset, etc). Sometimes people want to just show the latest for one department like "Comp". Sometimes people want to show the latest 3 Versions. Paul actually said it best:

     >  filter by Versions with 'comp' in the name, Group by Shot and here's where you set the new option to Only Display Top N Rows in the Grouping...  then sort by Date Created DESC and  BAM  the Holy Grail Latest Comp page!

    What if we added a new button to the Media app that's similar to what we have in Screening Room. This option would allow someone to only show all (by default) or only the 1/5/10/15 most recent Versions per Link. This would cover Paul's example by letting him first filter for "comp", then choose "Most recent only", showing the most recent comp Version per Shot (see attached for an example).

    It's not the "general solution", but it's an approach we can likely release faster.

    Our goal is to get out as many small features in this 10in10 series as we can, so by limiting scope on features like this, we're able to release more features overall. I look to you all to help me decide which route to take!

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hey everyone,

    I'm curious if you've all given this some thought. I'm also attaching an even simpler idea where users would just press a "latest" button and only see the latest Version per Shot/Asset/etc if toggled.

    I'd love to hear if this would be useful to any of you who voted for this feature.

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • 0
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    Sean McAlear

    Hi Ben,

    Both of these options sound good, but like Tony, we would need them available in Shotgun-proper.

     

    Thanks,

    -sean

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hey Sean and Tony,

    Thanks for the feedback. I can ask about adding this to all Version pages. But I'd also like to understand what's missing in the Media app for your studios. That will help me understand how we need to make the Media app better.

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • 0
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    Michał Krupa

    What Ben shown is exactly what I was thinking about lately.

     

    We would love to see such feature :)

  • 0
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    Ben Hadden

    Hello everyone!

    It gives me great pleasure to finally be able to say we can do this: http://blog.shotgunsoftware.com/2014/06/week-8-10-in-10.html

    I know it's not the *full* list of what some of you were hoping for, but hopefully it's a good start. I'm going to mark this one done for now and we can talk about next steps in a new feature request.

    Let me know if this works for your studios!

    Cheers,
    Ben

  • 1
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    Tommy

    I've had a few questions about this, so just to clarify - we *were* able to implement this on regular Version pages, as well as in the Media app.

    latest_version.png

    Pretty sweet, huh?

    Cheers,
    -Tommy

  • 0
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    Gael

    Hi,

    Would it be possible to have that option for PublishedFiles ?

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