Block multiple launching of Shotgun Desktop

Pipeline Integrations
1

Hello everyone,

I’m trying to stop multiple Shotgun Desktop running simultaneously.
Sometimes this causes troubles since our config has a custom tool update function builtin.

Is there an official or recommended way to do it?

Thanks,

Yu

multi

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3

Hi Yu

I’ve moved this topic over to our #pipeline category, as Shotgun Desktop falls under that.

We have a ticket already logged internally to look at this, although admittedly it’s low in priority.
I’m not sure if there is anything you could implement your self. I’ll run it past the team.

Thanks
Phil

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Hi Phil,

Thank you for your quick response!

Cheers,

Yu

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Hi Yu

So we discussed it, and I don’t unfortunately have any code examples to share but I do have a suggestion that may work, but would require some figuring out.

You could create a bat, exe, python file for example that wraps the Shotgun Desktop launcher. So when the user clicks to launch Shotgun Desktop, it would actually launch your script.

Your script would then be responsible for checking if a Shotgun process was already running in Windows and then if it wasn’t it would launch the main Shotgun Desktop executable.
It could then show a dialog saying “Shotgun Desktop is already running, please use that rather than launching a new one.” if a process was found. And I’m not sure if this would be possible/easy to do, but maybe it could even bring the Shotgun window to the foreground/maximize.

Some downsides this approach would be that, if Shotgun Desktop ever got into a situation where the process hung, but it was not really running, then the user would need to kill the Shotgun process before being able to launch.

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8

I think I’m logged on that ticket haha.

As I’m now at a studio where we have multiple projects at the same time it’s actually handy to have multiple desktops with multiple projects open.

But it is an issue in some cases and your suggestion would help.

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9

Thank you for your suggestions.
And I agree that multpile launchers would be nice for studios with multiple projects.

One of our TDs actually came up with the similar idea before but we haven’t developed anything yet. I feel the bat wrapper might be the best option we can take for now.

I’ll talk with others and see if this works well with our environment.

Thanks,
Yu

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