API Usage Tips

Below is a list of helpful tips when using the Flow Production Tracking API. We have tried to make the API very simple to use with predictable results while remaining a powerful tool to integrate with your pipeline. However, there’s always a couple of things that crop up that our users might not be aware of. Those are the types of things you’ll find below. We’ll be adding to this document over time as new questions come up from our users that exhibit these types of cases.

Importing

We strongly recommend you import the entire shotgun_api3 module instead of just importing the shotgun_api3.Shotgun class from the module. There is other important functionality that is managed at the module level which may not work as expected if you only import the shotgun_api3.Shotgun object.

Do:

import shotgun_api3

Don’t:

from shotgun_api3 import Shotgun

Multi-threading

The Flow Production Tracking API is not thread-safe. If you want to do threading we strongly suggest that you use one connection object per thread and not share the connection.

Entity Fields

When you do a find() or a create() call that returns a field of type entity or multi-entity (for example the ‘Assets’ column on Shot), the entities are returned in a standard dictionary:

{'type': 'Asset', 'name': 'redBall', 'id': 1}

For each entity returned, you will get a type, name, and id key. This does not mean there are fields named type and name on the Asset. These are only used to provide a consistent way to represent entities returned via the API.

• type: the entity type (CamelCase)

• name: the display name of the entity. For most entity types this is the value of the code field but not always. For example, on the Ticket and Delivery entities the name key would contain the value of the title field.

CustomEntities

Entity types are always referenced by their original names. So if you enable CustomEntity01 and call it Widget. When you access it via the API, you’ll still use CustomEntity01 as the entity_type.

If you want to be able to remember what all of your CustomEntities represent in a way where you don’t need to go look it up all the time when you’re writing a new script, we’d suggest creating a mapping table or something similar and dumping it in a shared module that your studio uses. Something like the following:

# studio_globals.py

entity_type_map = {
  'Widget': 'CustomEntity01',
  'Foobar': 'CustomEntity02',
  'Baz': 'CustomNonProjectEntity01,
}

# or even simpler, you could use a global like this
ENTITY_WIDGET = 'CustomEntity01'
ENTITY_FOOBAR = 'CustomEntity02'
ENTITY_BAZ = 'CustomNonProjectEntity01'

Then when you’re writing scripts, you don’t need to worry about remembering which Custom Entity “Foobars” are, you just use your global:

import shotgun_api3
import studio_globals

sg = Shotgun('https://my-site.shotgrid.autodesk.com', 'script_name', '0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456')
result = sg.find(studio_globals.ENTITY_WIDGET,
                 filters=[['sg_status_list', 'is', 'ip']],
                 fields=['code', 'sg_shot'])

ConnectionEntities

Connection entities exist behind the scenes for any many-to-many relationship. Most of the time you won’t need to pay any attention to them. But in some cases, you may need to track information on the instance of one entity’s relationship to another.

For example, when viewing a list of Versions on a Playlist, the Sort Order (sg_sort_order) field is an example of a field that resides on the connection entity between Playlists and Versions. This connection entity is appropriately called PlaylistVersionConnection. Because any Version can exist in multiple Playlists, the sort order isn’t specific to the Version, it’s specific to each _instance_ of the Version in a Playlist. These instances are tracked using connection entities in Shtogun and are accessible just like any other entity type in Flow Production Tracking.

To find information about your Versions in the Playlist “Director Review” (let’s say it has an id of 4). We’d run a query like so:

filters = [['playlist', 'is', {'type':'Playlist', 'id':4}]]
fields = ['playlist.Playlist.code', 'sg_sort_order', 'version.Version.code', 'version.Version.user', 'version.Version.entity']
order=[{'column':'sg_sort_order','direction':'asc'}]
result = sg.find('PlaylistVersionConnection', filters, fields, order)

Which returns the following:

[{'id': 28,
  'playlist.Playlist.code': 'Director Review',
  'sg_sort_order': 1.0,
  'type': 'PlaylistVersionConnection',
  'version.Version.code': 'bunny_020_0010_comp_v003',
  'version.Version.entity': {'id': 880,
                             'name': 'bunny_020_0010',
                             'type': 'Shot'},
  'version.Version.user': {'id': 19, 'name': 'Artist 1', 'type': 'HumanUser'}},
 {'id': 29,
  'playlist.Playlist.code': 'Director Review',
  'sg_sort_order': 2.0,
  'type': 'PlaylistVersionConnection',
  'version.Version.code': 'bunny_020_0020_comp_v003',
  'version.Version.entity': {'id': 881,
                             'name': 'bunny_020_0020',
                             'type': 'Shot'},
  'version.Version.user': {'id': 12, 'name': 'Artist 8', 'type': 'HumanUser'}},
 {'id': 30,
  'playlist.Playlist.code': 'Director Review',
  'sg_sort_order': 3.0,
  'type': 'PlaylistVersionConnection',
  'version.Version.code': 'bunny_020_0030_comp_v003',
  'version.Version.entity': {'id': 882,
                             'name': 'bunny_020_0030',
                             'type': 'Shot'},
  'version.Version.user': {'id': 33, 'name': 'Admin 5', 'type': 'HumanUser'}},
 {'id': 31,
  'playlist.Playlist.code': 'Director Review',
  'sg_sort_order': 4.0,
  'type': 'PlaylistVersionConnection',
  'version.Version.code': 'bunny_020_0040_comp_v003',
  'version.Version.entity': {'id': 883,
                             'name': 'bunny_020_0040',
                             'type': 'Shot'},
  'version.Version.user': {'id': 18, 'name': 'Artist 2', 'type': 'HumanUser'}},
 {'id': 32,
  'playlist.Playlist.code': 'Director Review',
  'sg_sort_order': 5.0,
  'type': 'PlaylistVersionConnection',
  'version.Version.code': 'bunny_020_0050_comp_v003',
  'version.Version.entity': {'id': 884,
                             'name': 'bunny_020_0050',
                             'type': 'Shot'},
  'version.Version.user': {'id': 15, 'name': 'Artist 5', 'type': 'HumanUser'}}]

• version is the Version record for this connection instance.

• playlist is the Playlist record for this connection instance.

• sg_sort_order is the sort order field on the connection instance.

We can pull in field values from the linked Playlist and Version entities using dot notation like version.Version.code. The syntax is fieldname.EntityType.fieldname. In this example, PlaylistVersionConnection has a field named version. That field contains a Version entity. The field we are interested on the Version is code. Put those together with our f riend the dot and we have version.Version.code.

Flow Production Tracking UI fields not available via the API

Summary type fields like Query Fields and Pipeline Step summary fields are currently only available via the UI. Some other fields may not work as expected through the API because they are “display only” fields made available for convenience and are only available in the browser UI.

HumanUser

• name: This is a UI-only field that is a combination of the firstname + ' ' + lastname.

Shot

Smart Cut Fields: These fields are available only in the browser UI. You can read more about smart cut fields and the API in the Smart Cut Fields doc:

smart_cut_in
smart_cut_out
smart_cut_duration
smart_cut_summary_display
smart_duration_summary_display
smart_head_in
smart_head_out
smart_head_duration
smart_tail_in
smart_tail_out
smart_tail_duration
smart_working_duration

Pipeline Step summary fields on entities

The Pipeline Step summary fields on entities that have Tasks aren’t currently available via the API and are calculated on the client side in the UI. These fields are like step_0, or step_13. Note that the Pipeline Step entity itself is available via the API as the entity type Step.

Query Fields

Query fields are also summary fields like Pipeline Steps, the query is run from the client side UI and therefore is not currently supported in the API.

Audit Fields

You can set the created_by and created_at fields via the API at creation time. This is often useful for when you’re importing or migrating data from another source and want to keep the history in tact. However, you cannot set the updated_by and updated_at fields. These are automatically set whenever an entity is created or updated.

Logging Messages from the API

The API uses standard python logging but does not define a handler.

To see the logging output in stdout, define a streamhandler in your script:

import logging
import shotgun_api3 as shotgun
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

To write logging output from the Flow Production Tracking API to a file, define a file handler in your script:

import logging
import shotgun_api3 as shotgun
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG, filename='/path/to/your/log')

To suppress the logging output from the API in a script which uses logging, set the level of the Flow Production Tracking logger to a higher level:

import logging
import shotgun_api3 as shotgun
sg_log = logging.getLogger('shotgun_api3')
sg_log.setLevel(logging.ERROR)

Optimizations

Combining Related Queries

Reducing round-trips for data via the API can significantly improve the speed of your application. Much like “Bubble Fields” / “Field Hopping” in the UI, we can poll Flow Production Tracking for data on the fields of entities linked to our main query, both as a part of the query parameters as well as in the data returned.

Starting with a simple and common example, many queries require knowing what project your data is associated with. Without using “field hopping” in an API call, you would first get the project and then use that data for your follow up query, like so:

# Get the project
project_name = 'Big Buck Bunny'
sg_project = sg.find("Project", [['name', 'is', project_name]])

# Use project result to get associated shots
sg_shots = sg.find("Shot", [['project', 'is', sg_project]], ['code'])

With “field hopping” you can combine these queries into:

# Get all shots on 'Big Buck Bunny' project
project_name = 'Big Buck Bunny'
sg_shots = sg.find("Shot", [['project.Project.name', 'is', project_name]], ['code'])

As you can see above, the syntax is to use “.” dot notation, joining field names to entity types in a chain. In this example we start with the field project on the Shot entity, then specify we’re looking for the “name” field on the Project entity by specifying Project.name.

Now that we’ve demonstrated querying using dot notation, let’s take a look at returning linked data by adding the status of each Sequence entity associated with each Shot in our previous query:

# Get shot codes and sequence status all in one query
project_name = 'Big Buck Bunny'
sg_shots = sg.find("Shot", [['project.Project.name', 'is', project_name]],
                   ['code', 'sg_sequence.Sequence.sg_status_list'])

The previous examples use the find() method. However, it’s also applicable to the create() method.

Note

Due to performance concerns with deep linking, we only support using dot notation chains for single-entity relationships. This means that if you try to pull data through a multi-entity field you will not get the desired result.