Dependent Task workflow

[tokejepsen]

Hey,

I have been wondering how best to tackle dependent statuses workflow.

Our current situation is that we want to trigger statuses on tasks based on a workflow. 

Example 1
- An animator publishes an alembic cache.
- The alembic cache gets approved.
- The lighting task status needs to be updated to "Not Started" or "Pending Changes".

Example 2
- Two tasks of type "Compositing" is created on a shot named; "keying" and "compositing".
- Separate artists are assigned to "keying" and "compositing", and they work asynchronously.
- The "compositing" task is completed before the "keying" task.
- When the "keying" task is done, the "compositing" task's status needs to updated to "Pending Changes".

The biggest issue is how to defined what task trigger which task.
In the case above we could have the task of type "Animation", trigger a task of type "Lighting" under the same parent (shot). The problem with this, comes when dealing with multiple tasks of type "Lighting", at which point you might not know which task's status needs to be set to "Not Started"/"Pending Changes".

The best solution would be to somehow define the order of the tasks on a shot, but to be flexible enough we can't have a linear hierarchy. For example you might want to have multiple tasks of "Animation" completed before the single task of "Lighting" gets triggered to "Pending Changes". This means we are looking at a graph rather than a parent/child relationship

A potential candidate for representing this graph could be the "Incoming" and "Outgoing" links. Two issues when working with the links attribute: "Overview" and "Manual Setup".

Overview
It can be hard to get an overview of the links. Navigating to the side-bar and keeping track of the graph in your head can be very tricky.
This could be solved with a graph representation like https://github.com/LeGoffLoic/Nodz. Or maybe even a graph representation directly in Ftrack, as an alternative view to the "Hierarchy" view.

Manual Setup
Currently no links are created by default, which means there is quite a bit of manual labour involved in setting up the links.

Ftrack already sets up a hierarchy, so the graph could follow this and then let users define branching if needed.

I think maybe the first question is how other studios handle this? Manually?
Secondly has Ftrack already got plans to extend the links workflow?