Step by step API tutorials and thoughts about the ftrack learning process

[Mike]

Over the past couple of weeks I've been trying to learn how to dev for ftrack.  I'm making progress, but the process has been very painful.  I have the basics working- connect is running and I'm able to publish using the Maya plugin, but I'd really like to customize the experience more.  Here are some areas that have been a struggle for me:

- The usage examples/tutorials in the docs are missing a lot of context for a beginner like myself.  I have a hard time wrapping my head around a lot of the concepts because the examples either stop short or under-explain key concepts.

- I'm uncertain what order I need to do things.  Do I follow the API tutorials first and set up locations, get components working, and publishing through that system?  Or do I set up connect and get custom hooks/actions working?   Without a step by step tutorial to lay out the basic process, I find myself skipping all over the place and trying to do everything all at once which is a bit overwhelming.

- An example of this jumping around: As I mentioned before I have ftrack connect working, but I think my files are only being published to the cloud (I'm not sure where the default project dir would be).  So I jumped back to the API tutorials to see what they said about creating local files.  Now I'm jumping back to the connect docs to see what they say about location integration.  

I feel like the whole dev process could be outlined and condensed into an hour-long video tutorial (2-3 mins for each step).  Also, some visuals describing the dev process (like a road map), a quick video series outlining the basic process and performing common tasks, and a few more in-depth examples (maybe a downloadable example of a modified ftrack package) would help a lot of future devs.  

Everything else about ftrack is great and I'm excited about all the potential it has, I just wish it was a bit more accessible.

-Mike

[Björn Rydahl]

Hi Mike,

thank you for feedback. I’m sorry it has been painful for you but happy you still like ftrack.

There are quite a few big concepts you need to get your head around so I understand it can be confusing.

We are constantly working on reducing the effort required to get started, and your feedback will definitely help us do so.

I would also like to reach out to others reading this forum and ask if you have any similar experiences and what helped or what you

think would help getting started more easily.

Cheers

[Philip]

+ 1 for this.

I'm currently trying to write a custom publisher. I'm trying to get my head around the concept of AssetVersions and components, which is not to be confused with AssetBuilds (I think). On that subject there seems to be AssetVersions, AssetBuilds and Assets. That's quite confusing.

I would like to see a clear guide of what is expected when you want to publish a file through the api? For example I don't really know what fields are really expected when I want to create an asset version, I'm looking through the keys on an AssetVersion to try and figure it out. For the moment I don't know how to parent it to something, because it doesn't seem to have a parent property like the rest of the entities,  it has Asset, Task link, and I don't know what an Asset is, it doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere.

But I think In general a few video tutorials, or written ones about some of the core concepts, in an ordered\structured way would be good, focusing of course on the dev side of things.

[Björn Rydahl]

Hi Philip,

thank you for adding to this. We are currently updating some of the docs so I will try to incorporate this as well.

The main page for developer docs is here, and that is where we will add more topics:

http://ftrack.rtd.ftrack.com/en/latest/developing/index.html

and from there we will link to other documentation such as:

http://ftrack-python-api.rtd.ftrack.com/en/stable/

Cheers

[Philip]

I have been looking through there, and I had already come across this page:

http://ftrack.rtd.ftrack.com/en/3.3.25/developing/reviewing/publishing_components_for_review.html

I hadn't scrolled down though to the newer api section. That said the example doesn't cover how to create the AssetVersion itself.