Publish Execution

The publisher has several phases of execution that developers should be aware of before implementing custom publishing workflows.

Collection & Acceptance

When the Publisher is launched, items for the current user session are collected via the collector hook. The process_current_session() method of the configured collector plugin will be executed.

Similarly, if the user drags and drops external files, or browses external files via the file browser, the collector plugin’s process_file() method will be executed.

These methods will create items to be displayed in the Publisher interface. These items represent the “things” to be published.

Before the collected items are showing in the UI however, they will be processed for acceptance. Each configured publish plugin will have a chance to accept each collected item.

This acceptance phase has two tiers. The first tier is done by comparing the collected item’s type to a list of filters provided by the publish plugin. If the item’s type matches one of the plugin’s filters, the second tier of acceptance is executed by running the publish plugin’s accept() method.

All collected items will display one or more publish plugins that accepted them as tasks to be executed in the interface. These will show up as child items in the UI. Each of these tasks represents an instance of the associated publish plugin. Conceptually, these are the “actions” to be performed on the items.

Item Review

Once the acceptance phase is complete, the user can review the items, make changes to the target context of each, provide publish descriptions, take screen grabs, and update settings. Additional files can be dragged and dropped or browsed for collection.

Publishing

After the artist had taken the time to review the collected items, they can perform one of two actions.

1. They can run a validation pass on the items. This will execute the validate() method on each publish plugin in the list in the order in which they are displayed, passing in their parent item as the item to process. Any errors or warnings logged during this phase will be displayed in the UI.
2. The user can also decide to run the full publish pass. This will include all the validation steps above followed by execution of each plugin’s publish() and finalize() methods. The publisher will execute the publish method of each task, followed by the execution of each task’s finalize method. Again, the order will match the order of tasks in the interface.