I have been using Deadline to distribute tedious activities like archiving and watermarking movies. When these complete, I want the user to receive a notification email. This is not hard to set up. However, the way I have distributed the activities produces a lot of jobs. For example, for archiving, the user passes a list of assets to a script to be archived. Each asset in the list becomes a job. If the list is really long, then the user will end up receiving a lot of emails! Ideally, the user would receive just one email notifying him or her when the archive is complete. The email should have a list of archived assets as well.
Any good way to deal with this? Ideally, the activity is submitted as a job and each line item becomes a task. However, I do not see anything in the docs under manual submission that helps with that. You can batch a series of jobs together for organizational purposes. Could I somehow leverage that? Maybe I could write a plugin that tracks all of the jobs in the batch? When a batch is complete, send out an email, write a log, etc.
At the moment, the easy way to send any sort of e-mail would be to throw a dependent job in the mix that essentially does nothing, but has a list of users to be notified in it. When the jobs are done, the notification will be sent off.
The problem here is that the contents of that e-mail aren’t customizable.
We’ve thought about moving the e-mail and other notifications out to an event script since 6.0 when we removed Growl and a few other notification backends. At the moment, I think if you want a customized e-mail, having an OnJobFinished event and writing your own e-mails is the way to go. If your mail server requires passwords though, it’ll be tricky to keep them secure.
Also of note, smtplib changed in 2.7.12 due to SSL/TLS changes in Python, so if you’re using it in an event you’ll need to make sure it’ll support our Python version (2.7.11). I’ve been working with a user on that in the ticket system at the moment…