Documentation

This app provides a lot of the functionality of the previous File Manager but also improves it in a number of ways following the feedback we've received from you.

New Features

Some of the things we've changed from the previous file manager include

• We've removed the Change Work Area dialog as it was a clunky work-flow and also became very slow to use when a project had a significant number of Assets, Shots or Tasks.
  • Instead, when opening and saving work, it is now possible to navigate to a different Work Area using the My Tasks list and configurable Entity Trees on the left of the main UI.
  • Using this new navigation, it's possible to Open a file into your current Work Area (from another Work Area) and also Save directly into a different Work Area.
• We've removed the Version Up dialog and this functionality is now built directly into the Save dialog.
• We've added support for an {extension} key in the work template.
  • If this is defined then the user will be given a list of file extension options which they can choose from when saving a file.
• We've sped things up a bit! The app has to spend lots of time querying the file system and Shotgun to get the list of Work Files and Publishes and we've tried to optimize this quite a bit so that everything feels snappy!
• We've added many of the UI elements found in the new Loader including search boxes, navigation buttons and breadcrumb controls. We hope you'll feel right at home in these new UI's :)
• We've added support for custom actions (these appear in the right-click context menu for a file) which can be set up by implementing your own custom_actions hook...

Configuring the application

If you are using one of our default configurations, then everything is configured out of the box and nothing needs to be done.

If you are integrating the application into an existing pipeline configuration, please keep reading.

Configuring entity tabs

Every time the application is configured for an engine in a given environment, it needs to know which entities can be displayed in the tabs. This can be configured through the entities property. The default setting for the entities looks like this:

  entities:
  - caption: Assets
    entity_type: Task
    filters:
    - [entity, type_is, Asset]
    hierarchy: [entity.Asset.sg_asset_type, entity, step, content]
  - caption: Shots
    entity_type: Task
    filters:
    - [entity, type_is, Shot]
    hierarchy: [entity.Shot.sg_sequence, entity, step, content]

Entities is an array of settings to configure each tab. Each tab can be configured via four settings:

• caption is simply the title that will be displayed at the top of the tab.
• entity_type denotes the kind of entities to be able to 'Open', 'Save' or 'Create' from that tab.
• filters is a list of filters that will trim the number of results returned from Shotgun. The results are always filtered by project regardless of this setting. In the above scenario, we are splitting tasks into two tabs, one for shots and one for asset. This is done via the filters setting. It uses the standard Shotgun query syntax.
• hierarchy is a list of fields from the entity specified in the entity_type setting. It will be used to create the hierarchical view. In the Shots tab for example, we will end up with a list of sequences (Task.entity.Shot.sg_sequence) at the root of the view. Opening a sequence will reveal a list of shots (task.entity). Opening a shot will reveal a list of steps (task.step) and clicking on the step will reveal the tasks (task.content). There is no limit to how deep the hierarchy can be.

Known Issues

There are currently a few use-cases that aren't fully supported by this app yet. We do intend to add support for them in the near future so if you are affected by any of these then please let us know and we'll make sure we contact you when support is added.

• 3ds Max and Motionbuilder Support - File performance is slower in these DCCs under Windows compared to Maya and Nuke.
• Perforce/Versionless files - The app is still to go through testing with the Perforce workflow so it is very likely that it won't work.