Development Concepts

Introduction

The term "asset" is used often, and has many different meanings in different industries and even in different areas of the same production facility. In TACTIC, an asset is an atomic entity with metadata and files associated with it. To avoid confusion, the TACTIC assets are called "searchable objects," shortened to sObjects.

sTypes and sObjects

sObjects are the atomic entities (or assets) that TACTIC uses to manipulate data and check in files. An sObject can be any entity required in a production. Examples of sObjects include shots, textures, users, tasks, production notes, and so on.

Every sObject must belong to a search type, also known as sType. Search types are a set of unique string entities that serve to classify all variations of sObjects. Search types are registered in the "search_object" table in the "sthpw" database. This table defines the properties for each search type, and is used to ensure that sObjects adheres to their search type properties. For instance, in a custom project, you may have a custom/shot sType created for shot. Once it’s registered, you can add shot entries in the shot table that it generates. The shot entries are the shot sObjects.

It is technically possible to store data on assets anywhere, but the TACTIC approach is to use an SQL database so sObject data can be tracked in the database and rules can be enforced. In TACTIC, each sObject is represented as a table in the database. All sObjects for your project are stored in a project-wide database and cross-project sObjects (for example, those related to users) are stored in the main TACTIC database "sthpw."