Deadline pools and groups dropdown menu

At our studio we use pools to define a worker’s core counts and ram capacity, so artists with heavy renders can select only the beefiest workers if required

We’d love to have the publish “pool” and “group” input boxes support configurable dropdown menus, either scanning the deadline repo or by configuring manually like default variant names. This would end artists searching for the names of pools / groups or mistyping them

The current pool menus:

The awesome variant name options that we think the pools / groups should function like:

The stock deadline submitter, for all its problems and inefficiencies, does have this and it’s pretty handy
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This (and perhaps a Group override for nuke renders?) feels like a nice quality of life improvement, so I’m wondering if others think this is the best way to go

This is definitely on the road map but had some difficulties due to some design where Deadline could be configured to have multiple Deadline URLs in a project - so the step would have to be to first figure out which deadline URL is relevant, and then get its pools, etc. However, there was no logic in AYON Publisher to define the available attributes specific to an instance that may target a specific URL. There is a PR to resolve that, which may open doors to solve this for this particular feature.

In our studio we do have the dropdown box already, because we “hardcoded” the fact that we know we only have one server, etc.

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The logic is around here and here and also requires some changes to the addon itself which holds the ‘cache’ of the pools so we don’t need to query deadline for them each time.

We also have the allow/deny Machine List as enum listing the machines available on Deadline. For easy overview of all our customization see this branch compare.

So unlike editable text fields they are basically enums (list of options to choose from) - the machine list is a multiselection enum.

Again, the goal is to get these safely into AYON over time.

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