AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Feature Request: Add comments to jobs.

Hi Dev team,

I’d like to see a feature that can “Add comments” to jobs so that users can leave some notes and tie that to particular jobs. Or even tag other users.

BRs
Jay Vichyavichien

Hi Jay,

Each job has a Comment field, and has had one since the very first release of Deadline. It is not used by the system for anything job-related, and is often populated by the submitter with general info about where the job was submitted from. But it can be edited to contain ANY text that you might find useful. However, it is not meant for communication with other users, so tagging is not supported there.

I guess you are asking for something similar to the comments section in Git - you want series of notes to be associated with a job, producing a discussion log?

Currently any change to any property of the job is logged in the Job’s History. I wonder if adding the ability to enter custom History log entries would be beneficial. Right now, you could go and change the Priority of a job or suspend it, and this action would be logged, but there is no good way to enter a note WHY you made the change, unless you modify the Comment field, too. Inserting custom comments into the History would mean no huge changes in the Deadline infrastructure to accommodate this new feature.
Right now, you can open the Job Properties and enter a new Comment, e.g. “Entering some comment”, and the History will include a line saying something like

2017/02/22 00:32:01 borislav (super user) GATEWAY (GATEWAY\Borislav): Comment modified to: 'Entering some comment' .
So it is half way there. If the History dialog had filters to show only certain changes, it would be possible to see all changes to the Comments field, or all (possible future) custom notes, and thus give you something like what you asked for. Or there could be a dedicated view mode showing just comments. I guess tagging could add users to the notification list of the Job and inform them via the email or popup system about changed comments / custom notes.

Just thinking out loud. I am not responsible for Deadline design decisions, but I found myself online after midnight, so there you go :wink:

Hi,

We already support a “Comment” field in each Deadline job, which is displayed in the “Comment” field in the Jobs panel:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … ml#general

This field can also be get/set via our API as well:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … be2239640e

EDIT: Ah, Bobo beat me to it. Just to add to what he said, there is already an API function to add a custom history entry to a job:

RepositoryUtils.AddJobHistoryEntry( jobId, string )

docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … 191445bbd7

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