In a large production environment, where you have hundreds of Engines and thousands of Jobs, it can seem imposing to try to find things. Smedge has had the ability to filter out what shows up in the lists, and Smedge 2018 and later versions have greatly improved on this filtering ability with a simpler interface that actually gives you more power to find what you need. This post is meant to give you a simple introduction to the power of this system.
Accessing the view filter
As with prior versions of Smedge, the filter for every view is at the very top of the view, under the tabs where you select views. By default, the filter string is hidden and the filter is not applied until you open it. Click on the text that says “Click to filter this view” to show the filter field and immediately apply that filter to the view. If you have a filter string that is limiting the what you see, you can simply close the filter area to revert to the view default view display, and re-open the filter later to re-apply your filter on the view.
Basic filtering
If you start typing text into the field, the default action is to apply the filter based on the name value. Typing Apple, for example, will find any jobs that have the text “Apple” anywhere in their name. If you add multiple words (separated by spaces), it searches for both patterns in the name. For example Apple Cat would find a jobs named “Apple_Cat_01” or “Cat_x_Apple” but would not find jobs with only “Apple” or “Cat” in the name, like “Cat_5”. Note that case doesn’t matter, so searching for dog will find both “dog_01” and “DOG_02”.
Finding things other than the name
If you want to filter for other parameters of the job, you can type something like type=Blender to see only the Blender jobs in the list. You can also type:Blender to accomplish this. If you need to search for only Blender jobs with “Cat” in the name, you can combine the searches using type=Blender name=Cat. You can find Blender jobs that have both “Apple” and “Cat” in the name using type=Blender name=Apple Cat.
Alternate comparisons
It may be useful to search for jobs with a priority greater than a certain value. You can use comparison operators to accomplish this. Priority>50 will find all jobs with a priority above 50. You can also use <, >=, or <=. You can combine multiple priority searches as well. For example, Priority>50 Priority<75 finds jobs with priority from 51 to 74. And you can combine other field searches as before. Priority<=50 type=Maya name=Cat will find all Maya jobs with a priority up to 50 and the word “Cat” in the name.
Search Options
The views in Smedge can show a list of Jobs, Work, and/or Engines. The default search will look at objects independently, so if you search a list that has both Engines and Jobs, looking for End will find both a job named “End Scene” and a machine named “Render-01”. Smedge gives you options to change this behavior in the drop down menu on the right end of the filter control area. The options are:
| All By Parameter | Search each object by its parameters (the default). |
| Filter Engines By Work | Filters the items in the Engine list using any work items they are running. Typing End will only show engines that are running work from the End Scene job. |
| Filter Work By Engine | Filter items in the Work list using the Engine that is running the work. Typing End will show work running on a node named Render but not one named Workstation. |
Default View Filters
The filtering system works that same for defining the global view filters using the Customize Views feature in Smedge. Unlike the view filter at the top of each view, the filter you apply in the Customize panel is always applied to the view. This is how you can define your own custom views that show only a subset of the data you want, but because every view still has the local view filter at the top, you can further optionally limit the items shown in your customized views with the same filter strings shown above.
