Custom Context Data with QML

#1

I’m looking for a way to programmatically supply custom context data to the QML UI before it runs collection. Preferably, this custom data would be present at every recreation of a context instance whenever the reset button is pressed.

I know there is a way to supply this through the command line interface as described in this post:
$ pyblish --data key value --data key2 value2 publish

But, my current implementation does some data gathering pre-pyblish and I need to send it to be available in the context at all times, no matter the collection plugins being run. Because I’m already doing so much with python beforehand, I feel it would be cleaner to just set this data programmatically and make a call to open the GUI without having to construct a subprocess string to execute.

Just curious if there is anything similar to the command line --data flag, but in the pyblish/pyblish_qml libraries?

#2

Hm, when you say “QML” do you mean the language or the Pyblish GUI? Assuming you mean the GUI, I’d use a collector for this. Make one specifically to fetch whatever data you require for subsequent collectors, and have it be called first and always. From there, you effectively have a Python script that’ll run before any publish to gather any kind of data you need for the context.

#3

Yes, I mean the GUI when I say QML.

As for your suggestion with the collector plugins, that’s what I’m currently doing. The issue I’m facing is as follows:

I have a stand alone Pyblish tool (qml gui) that runs a collector plugin which searches for and identifies “asset root folders” and adds them as instances (each asset root folder is its own instance). The catch-22 is I don’t want to hard code into the collector plugin the starting path that the collection starts from. I want to make one “Asset Folder Collector” plugin and be able to change its ‘start folder’ variable.

How can I programmatically (not through command line) pass a ‘start folder’ variable to the context?

Whenever the qml gui starts up, it creates a new Context obj from scratch and the same for when clicking on the reset button. So with a brand new context obj, how do I pass it data to allow the collector plugin to know where to start its search from?

PS: I’m able to make some minor changes to the library to support this, but I want to make sure I’m not overengineering anything or that I’m not missing a glaringly obvious way to do this.

#4

Hm, could you not simply have a pre-collector, something that always runs first, that looks for your asset folder and stores it in the context for subsequent collectors to look at?

# Collector 1
context.data["assetFolder"] = "/some/path"

# Collector 2
context.data["assets"] = os.listdir(context.data["assetFolder"]

Taking a step back, it sounds like you may be better of storing your asset folder in an environment variable, and using that during collection?

context.data["assets"] = os.listdir(os.environ["ASSET_FOLDER"])

Generally, the environment is good at passing things into a new process so long as what you need can be represented as strings. It doesn’t sound like you need it, but you could edit the source; the crux being that it’d be more challenging for me and others to help given we won’t know what your source would look like.