Hi all,
Wanted to know if it was possible to create some sort of mechanism which would allow someone with Deadline admin privileges to send a popup message to users that have Deadline Monitor open. Monitor already has the capability to popup messages, so in theory it could be possible to parse the Manage users list in Monitor to send out a broadcast type message.
Ideas, solutions welcome! 
Thank you!
Dan
It might be possible, but it would be highly impractical.
First you have to keep in mind that only the Job Completed message can carry an additional note with it that you can customize.
Second, the message is generated by the Worker that completed the job. So it is not possible to just run a script to flip a job from Queued to Completed to produce a message. That means you need to submit a dummy job and have an actual Worker complete it. Of course, the dummy job could be very lightweight, so it would take only a few seconds. But it would still require a Worker to process it…
The Deadline Client on the machine to receive the popup message does not have to be configured to allow Popup notifications. The Job itself can force a popup message to be sent, so we can use that even if the local client configuration does not enable popup notifications.
Note that the message is received and displayed by the Deadline Launcher, so the Monitor does not have to be running to get this working, just the Launcher must be listening…
Assuming you are ok with some of the limitations above, you could
Submit a super simple job that does nothing (maybe a script job with a script that does nothing). Or you could create a new simple plugin that does not expect any scene or script arguments, and really does nothing.
Possibly set the job’s Name to something like “NOTIFICATION! PLEASE READ THE ATTACHED NOTE!”
In the submission’s Job Info file, set the relevant keys to define which users you want to notify, and what message you want to attach to the notification. The full list can be found here, but the major ones are:
NotificationTargets=bobo,dan,obiwan
OverrideNotificationMethod=true
PopupNotification=true
NotificationNote=If you can read this,[EOL]the popup notification worked.
Let the job complete on one of the Workers, and the users listed in the NotificationTargets should get the popup telling them the job completed, including the NotificationNote text. The popup will contain a bunch of stats data about the job nobody cares about, so it is not very clean, but hey… you sent the message!
So not very elegant, but it kinda works.
Thanks for the detailed reply Bobo!