README

Shotgun Event Framework
=======================

Overview
--------

When you want to access the Shotgun event stream, the preferred way to do so it
to poll the events table, get any new events, process them and repeat.

A lot of stuff is required for this process to work successfully, stuff that may
not have any direct bearing on the business rules that need to be applied.

The role of the framework is to keep any tedious event polling related tasks out
of the hands of the business logic implementor.

The framework is a daemon process that runs on a server and polls the Shotgun
event stream. When events are found, the daemon hands the events out to a series
of registered plugins. Each plugin can process the event as it wishes.

The daemon handles:

- Registering plugins from one or more specified paths.
- Reloading plugins when they change on disk.
- Polling the Shotgun event stream.
- Remembering the last processed event id.
- Starting from the last processed event id on daemon startup.
- Catching any connection errors.
- Logging information to stdout, file or email as required.
- Creating a connection to Shotgun that will be used by the callback.
- Handing off events to registered callbacks.

A plugin handles:

- Registering any number of callbacks into the framework.
- Processing a single event when one is provided by the framework.

Registering a plugin
--------------------

When the daemon loads, it looks in defined plugin locations and tries to import
any .py file. If a .py file has a *registerCallbacks* function, it is called,
passing in a Registrar object. The Registrar is what is used to do the callback
registrations.

Here is an example of a *registerCallbacks* function:

>>> def registerCallbacks(reg):
...     reg.registerCallback('name', 'apiKey', doEvent)

The registerCallback method of the Registrar object requires three arguments:

- A script name (as per Shotgun)
- A script API key (as per Shotgun)
- A callback to provide events to for processing

Optionally, you can also provide an argument that will be passed on to the
processing callback.

A callback
----------

A callback requires three arguments:

- A shotgun instance with which to fetch any required information
- The event to process
- Any extra arguments provided at registration time

Here is an example of a functional callback:

>>> def doEvent(sg, event, args):
...     logging.info('In event %s...' % str(event))

Logging information
-------------------

All information can be passed out of the system (framework or plugins) by using
the logging facilities of Python.

Advantages of the framework
---------------------------

- Only deal with a single polling mechanism, not with polling in many different
  scripts.
- Minimize network and database load (only one poller that supplies event to
  many event processing plugins).

Going forward
-------------

Here is some stuff that could be changed or added going forward:

- Parallelize the processing of events
- Pass all data to the callbacks using a context object for better future
  scalability.
- Allow for late creation of the Shotgun connections on access by the callback
- Make config reading more robust