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Event Types

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kporangehat edited this page Mar 1, 2011 · 2 revisions

Shotgun generates read-only EventLogEntries for every destructive action performed by a user. And by "destructive", we simply mean an action that updates the database somehow, not some tantrum that a user has (hopefully). Shotgun also logs some additional useful events that to help keep track of activity on your Shotgun instance.

Structure of Event Types

The basic structure of event types is broken into 3 parts:

Application_EntityType_Action

  • Application: Is always 'Shotgun' for events automatically created by the Shotgun server. If you decide to use the EventLogEntry entity to log events for your scripts or tools, you would use your tool name here.
  • EntityType: This is the entity type in Shotgun that was acted upon (eg. Shot, Asset, etc.)
  • Action: The general action that was taken. (eg. New, Change, Retirement, Revival)

Standard Event Types

Each entity type has a standard set of events associated with it when it's created, updated, deleted, and revived. They follow this pattern:

  • Shotgun_EntityType_New: a new entity was created. Example: Shotgun_Task_New
  • Shotgun_EntityType_Change: an entity was modified. Example: Shotgun_HumanUser_Change
  • Shotgun_EntityType_Retirement: an entity was deleted. Example: Shotgun_Ticket_Retirement
  • Shotgun_EntityType_Revival: an entity was revived. Example: Shotgun_CustomEntity03_Revival

Additional Event Types

These are the additional event types that are logged by Shotgun:

  • Shotgun_Attachment_View: an Attachment (file) was viewed by a user.
  • Shotgun_Reading_Change: a threaded entity has been marked read or unread. For example, a Note was read by a user. The readings are unique to the entity<->user connection so when a Note is read by user 'joe' it may still be unread by user 'jane'
  • Shotgun_Big_Query: a query was run that returned > 500 records. This is a legacy event that was used to track performance issues related to pages that had been ill-configured by users and will likely be deprecated.
  • Shotgun_User_Login: a user logged in to Shotgun
  • Shotgun_User_Logout: a user logged out of Shotgun (hopefully to go home for the evening).

Custom Event Types

Since EventLogEntries are entities themselves, you can create them using the API just like any other entity type. As mentioned previously, if you'd like to have your scripts or tools log to the Shotgun event log, simply devise a thoughtful naming structure for your event types and create the EventLogEntry as needed following the usual methods for creating entities via the API.

Note that EventLogEntries cannot be updated or deleted (that would defeat the purpose of course).

Performance

Event log tables can get large very quickly. While Shotgun does very well with event logs that get into the millions of records, there's an inevitable degradation of performance for pages that display them when they get too big. This volume of events is pretty uncommon except in rare extreme circumstances. This does not mean your Shotgun server performance will suffer, just any pages that are specifically displaying EventLogEntries.

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