Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to set Job ID as standard job option in Job Info File, then use the same ID to set dependency for the next job. UUID4 to make sure its unique… I promise it will be unique
I know Deadline Command returns ID for submitted job, but still. This way we could submit all jobs at once with Batch Job Submission.
I don’t know, this would be odd. It is common for databases to generate their own ids.
But perhaps some other mechanism to declare jobs as dependencies before submission would be nice. Say we submit the jobs as a list, you can say “I want the sixth job to be dependent on job number two from the list.” Maybe there are better possibilities.
Another approach is to have the submission file be more of a script. That way the first job returns an id, then the second job can depend on that $id.
A second approach is to be able to reserve Id’s, i.e. tell DL “give me an Id” and then submit the job with that Id, as well as dependent jobs.
Speaking of Id’s, the current Id format is stupidly unusable. If I ask an artist “which of your jobs is the one that’s having issues”, s/he should be able to tell me, “oh, it’s job 3504” or even “job 27403”. But the current I-don’t-know-how-many-characters-long Id is plainly humanly unusable. Maybe there are certain applications where that complexity is needed/useful, but in VFX it’s overkill.
Cool! Seems like we should submit every job (even single jobs) via this XML approach, that way whether it’s one job or multiple jobs, it’s the same approach.