Hi all
I’d like to request a more complex form for creating new entities. It’s very difficult for us to fill in entity fields as the autocomplete results are pulled from across the project and not every published file contains its context in the filename e.g. trying to specify a render camera when they’re all called renderCamera.abc and there’s no contextual data presented. There doesn’t seem to be a way to limit this or display more information about the results that appear. As such it’s very difficult to know which file you’re adding.
I’d be happy with the advanced search option that appears when linking entities (an autocomplete field appears at first with an adjacent “Advanced” link that brings up a fully-featured search dialog.)
Regards
David
Hey David, best thing to do here is update the publisher to provide more context in the published file name. It can be different to the filename. Or change the filename of course, but then that has the potential to make the cam name in mayas outiner too long for readability.
I think there’s already a feature request in for this. I’ve certainly requested it before!
Hey Patrick, nice to hear from you!
Will this affect versioning? Or will SG still see items with identical filenames as the same file? I’m worried I’ll end up with every version appearing in the Loader as SG doesn’t recognise them as versions of the same file.
Regards
Dave
Did a bit of digging. Seems like a PublishedFile has the following fields:
Name - used by the loader to group versions
Published File Name - appears in autocomplete searches when populating entity fields and matches the actual file name by default
Path - contains the actual file name.
If Published File Name can indeed be different to the name that appears in the path, that sounds like my solution for the time being.
1 Like
Okay, this seems to work nicely. Thanks for the tip, Patrick!
I’m having the same issue. I’ve submitted a feature request. Hopefully, they’ll put it in the roadmap.
Generally in this situation I would advise to have contextual information in your filenames.
It’s the same when naming Shots, instead of naming them 0010, 0020, 0030 the best practise is to name them with more contextual info like:
101_SEQ_0010 etc.
yep, but that makes filenames longer and the validation can’t handle that in the web UI, so It’s prone to human errors, something that I wanna avoid.
If you validate your filenames in toolkit you don’t really need these validations in the web ui?
I don’t think I’m following and have half info.
In general industry standard best practises are to include contextual info in any file names and directory structure/shot naming conventions.
I can list a bunch of things that will become more complex or need unnecessary lookups based on naming shots 0010, 0020 etc…
Haha, that’s true, I didn’t give u enough info.
I run my own studio, and I’m aware of the standards, but I do my best to keep things simple, and I’m not a big fan of long names, especially when seeing the UI. For me, the shorter, the better.
I know that having duplicates on different sequences would make the pipeline check two times, but I believe It would make the overall names simpler and easier to see.
Having the option of making the name unique for the linked entity doesn’t look so complex and can accommodate other pipelines + advanced search (I’ve added both to the suggestions)
As an example, I wanna have an Asset Char-A with a “clothes” or “textures” sub-assets and another Asset, let’s say, Char-B, with the same naming structure without the need to repeat the asset name everywhere just to make It easier to reference that on the shots.
So you want the global search, in this case, to add more info to the display?
Playing devils advocate here, for people using some more industry standard naming conventions this would clutter the search results with info thats already in the publishes filename 
I believe the solution would be setting on the field, what info one would want to display!