0

Usage of spaces in between words when doing a project setup

Bruno Guerreiro

July 28, 2015 16:23

None

Follow

Hi Support Team,

 

Hi would like to know if its possible to setup a project (with: tank setup_project) with spaces between words? When choosing a folder for the project.

 

The reason why this is very important for us its because we already have a lot of client folders That have 2 or 3 words separated by spaces (not underscores). 

Changing the names off those folders so they can have an underscore and we can setup new projects inside is a problem for all our previous projects located in that same client folder, because when ever we open an old 3ds max file, nuke... etc all the links will be missing and we will need to relink them all!

 

We would appreciate some feedback on this issue

 

All the best

 

Bruno

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

5 comments

• 0
  
  Bruno Guerreiro July 28, 2015 19:04

  Also I forgot to say, we are all working in a windows 7 64 enviorment

• 0
  
  Permanently deleted user July 28, 2015 19:04

  Hello there Bruno!

  As you probably have discovered, the setup_project command doesn't allow you to enter a project folder name that contains spaces. We have a number of checks in the code which ensures that folders do not contain spaces.

  I did a quick test and disabled most of these checks and didn't discover any immediate issues, which is promising.

  However, with the current version of toolkit, there is no way I can think of that you can run with project folders containing spaces. In order for this to work, we would need to make code changes and test things carefully. I will loop this back to our product team so that they can prioritize and schedule this feature!

  I'll report back when I know more!

  Thanks!
  Manne

• 0
  
  Bruno Guerreiro July 28, 2015 19:04

  Thank you Manne,

  We will be waiting for your news/update on this issue

   

  All the best

   

  Bruno

• 0
  
  Permanently deleted user July 28, 2015 19:04

  Hello Bruno!

  Apologies for not getting back to you sooner - I have been trying to catch our product team to get the low-down on this. We also wanted to gather a bit more intel to better understand where we currently are with this.

  Basically, there are a couple of different scenarios here where spaces are playing a role - there can be spaces in the path leading to the toolkit code distribution and spaces in project names and data resources on disk. Toolkit is generally pretty flexible and can be configured using hooks and configuration - in this area there are however some built-in validation checks in Toolkit at the moment, effectively making it very difficult to configure a workflow for projects with spaces. Towards the end of last week, I did a quick engineering spike to see what happened if we removed those built-in checks and unfortunately it looks like there are quite a few things which will need to be tweaked before toolkit can support spaces in project names. It is possible to do add support fort this, but it is by no means a quick thing and something which we would need to schedule as part of our sprint process (as opposed to bug fixes and simple tweaks where we can often react right away!). 

  Having said that, the second use case where there is a space in the path leading to the actual configuration and code areas on disk is something we are now actively working on - but it also turns out to be tricky - and we are hoping to be able to release support for this soon!

  Is there any workaround solution you can think of where you somehow can work around this constraint? Or would it be possible to change your naming convention for future projects to avoid spaces? I have created a feature ticket and adding it for consideration for our next development sprint!

  Manne

• 0
  
  Bruno Guerreiro July 28, 2015 19:04

  Hi Manne,

  Thank you for attention on this subject.

  It sadness me to hear that this is such a complex fix. It does not change the appreciation i have for the Shotgun/Toolkit pipeline solution, it is indeed one of a kind, never the less, in my opinion this little bug is one of those things that seriously affects the adaptability of Toolkit to an existent pipeline. 

  In our case we have the project folder located inside of a client folder, for new clients with new projects, this issue is not a problem, but most of our work comes from previous clients, and i would say that roughly 60% of those clients have a space in their name.

  The only workaround is changing the names of those folders so the spaces became _underscores, this as you can imagine breaks all the links on the files that reside in those folders, shortcuts, max files, nuke files, illustrator files... In some apps it is easier to re-link stuff, others harder, bet for me, it is especially hard to explain to the management and the artists why this needs to happen.

  Again thank you for considering this issue as it is really important, not only for our company but i would say for all companies that have a folder structure based on Client Name/Project Name.

  For now we are just going to name all new client and project folders without spaces, for the old clients we will have to do the _underscore Re-link drill.

  I will be looking forward for a possible update.

   

  All the best

   

  Bruno