Forcing Shotgun Browser right click menu to update

Hi everyone!

In the past I had a few instances where the Shotgun Browser right click menu was kinda slow in picking up changes of Software entities. Usually hitting F5 in the browser a few times helped, but this time nothing seems to help.
I created a new Software entity and on one artist machine I cannot bring it to show up (for everyone else it is showing). I tried hitting F5 in the browser, restarting Shotgun Desktop, login in and out of Shotgun and Shotgun Desktop and rebooting the machine. All no dice. So my question is: Is there a definit way of forcing the Shotgun Menu to refresh?

Any hint or help is much appreciated!

Fabian

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Hi Fabian,

you can try to delete the Shotgun local cache on that machine and restart SG Desktop.

That should force the actions menu to refresh.

Cheers,
Francis

6 Likes

Hi @mathurf!

EDIT: Do NOT do what I described here. We ran into issues with it! Leaving the message in here for the record.

Thanks for your reply! Your solution definitely works, but we generally see deleting the shotgun cache as a last resort in our studio, since re-caching takes 15-20 min.
Luckily I found another solution which allows us to keep the cache:

  1. Find all files that match this pattern (3 files in my case):
    /home/<USER-NAME>/.shotgun/<SITE-NAME>/sitec<PIPELINE-CONFIG-ID>.basic.desktop/tk-desktop/shotgun_engine_commands_v1.sqlite
  2. Rename them to something like shotgun_engine_commands_v1_BACKUP.sqlite.
  3. Refresh the browser.
  4. Right click menu is correct now.

Thanks again for your help!

Cheers,
Fabian

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Scratch that. I am running into issues on other projects now. We probably have to go for the cache wipe out.

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Hey @Fabian,

Yes the “scorched earth” approach has it’s drawbacks (time) but it should do the trick for you as @mathurf mentioned. Let us know how you get on.

-David

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I sometimes have the same issue for one of our users.
I do exactly like you’ve suggested but it’s quite a heavy procedure.

What could be the origin of this issue?

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Ok so this is becoming kinda magical. I deleted the shotgun cache for some artist and the issue was briefly fixed but came back. In one case it came back immediately: Like cache deleted, Shotgun Desktop checked out everything from scratch, refresh the browser and the Software entity is still missing. Feels like I’ve hit some kind of edge case scenario. Will hopefully find the time to post some details about this soon.

Cheers,
Fabian

2 Likes

Hi everyone!

It’s been some time but this issue still persists for us. So I wanted to give a little more detial about this.

So we used to have 2 Software entities for Nuke 11.2v4 (1) and Nuke 11.3v2 (2). We make use of the “projects” field a lot to limit Software versions to certain projects. That means some projects use one software version, some the other and some both.
The issue started happening after we added Nuke 12.1v4 (3) to the software entities. We basically proceeded in the same Fassion and limited the Nuke version to some projects (some of which also have Nuke 11.3v2 enabled).

Nuke 12 is now popping up in other projects and/or is missing from other projects in the Shotgun menu. Shotgun Desktop is unaffected from this (thank god).

Hope this sheds some light on the issue. All my pocking around in the desktopserver code did not bring up something meaningful and I also cannot give you a reliable way of reproducing this. Will let you know if I find out more details.

Cheers,
Fabian

Bringing this one back from the dead…

Anyone have any nicer solutions to this other than forcing a deletion of the sqlite file per user, per machine?

Even if there is no solution other than the above, is there at least a way to cache all environment actions at once via api so at least I have a working sqlite file I can then replace with the dated one per user per machine?

Also has moving to webhooks removed this issue where making changes to the actions are no longer an issue and appear as expected after an update?

Hi @Halil !

This issue has never been fixed for us, but we found that enabling/disabling any Software Entity pretty much forces an update on the right click menu. In our case we have an older version of Nuke Assist that we toggle on or off whenever an artist reports this issue. Really not an elegant solution but it works like 95% of the time. Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Fabian

3 Likes

Ah that did the trick. Thanks!

1 Like

Thats a great trick!

I have also noticed that it starts becoming easier to regenerate the caches if your config is cached on a fast local SSD or when you dont have many configs to generate caches for (like if you have multiple dev environements for a project, maybe just user restrict them unless you need to dev for it).

So maybe try devving with a descriptor pointing to a local cache copy of your dev environement (i.e a local git clone on a SSD/NVME storage).

1 Like