Tk-multi-workfiles2 recursive tree hierarchy?

Pipeline Integrations
1

Hey all,

Looks like tk-multi-workfiles2 currently will take a list of fields to determine how to display the entities in the tree but is there a way to get it to look at fields recursively?

This becomes more apparent if you want to display Assets in a nested structure according to their parent/child relationships. Essentially we have a large number of Sets that are linked in a way where at the leaf level theres a few 100 Assets and ideally these are represented in a way where the tree only lists the top level Assets and then artists can dig down into those children in a recursive manner until they reach the leaf Assets.

If there is a parent/child relationship like the following in SG:

ParentMasterSet > SubSetOfMaster1 > ChildAsset1
######|---------> SubSetOfMaster2 > ChildAsset2

And in workfiles config we specify the ‘parents’ field should be used in the hierarchy, then we get something like the following:

ParentMasterSet > SubSetOfMaster1
######|---------> SubSetOfMaster2

SubSetOfMaster1 > ChildAsset1

SubSetOfMaster2 > ChildAsset2

Here we get knowledge of immediate children and parent links but it kind of makes things confusing because the “SubSetOfMaster” assets are displayed at the root level of the tree.

Anyone know of a way to achieve this, or is it more of a feature request?

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2

Hey Halil

Can you add filters to the various hierarchy levels so that the children only show up at the correct levels?
Ie perhaps only show assets in the root if they have no parent.

If you have more than two levels deep, then you may need a different way to be able to distinguish the various levels and filter on them. For example, you might need a custom field on the asset entity to describe its place in the hierarchy, though I appreciate that might get ugly.
How many levels of hierarchy do you have?

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3

Hey Philip,

I’d say currently 5 levels max… so far, but this is a 2D show so the breakup and need for new sets is a little more fluid than 3D.

I hadn’t thought to use filters in that way, that might restrict the root level to what we would expect but I think anything after the second level would get lost and filtered out. Perhaps dot notation filters might get me something depending on how the multientity parents field behaves. I’ll keep digging and trying different filters.

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4

OK, I think it’s fair to say that in this situation the workfile app’s hierarchy is not going to do what you’re after here.

You could probably get it to do what you wanted if it was 1 or 2 deep, but after that I think you would struggle with the filtering.

Also I assume that you don’t have a nested folder structure in your schema, so all assets are flat in terms of folders?

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5

Yeah in the filesystem I experimented with nesting but realised this isn’t really achievable. So we rested with the hierarchy Asset Type > First Letter of Asset [a-z] > Asset Name to reduce the amount of folders within each Asset Type folder as there are many sets and a previous show had 8000+ folders in the Sets folder. Again, one of the quirks of a 2D show…

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