@antalszvak

I noticed earlier that we’re communicating via our internal support system, but I wanted to respond here as well in case anyone else has a similar issue.

While we haven’t tracked down the exact cause of this error yet, we believe that it’s almost certainly related to something about the format of the Google Sheet that this project is connected to. As soon as we get some details about the Sheet’s structure and data, we should be able to track down what’s causing this problem.

If any updates occur due to our troubleshooting, I’ll mirror them here just in case this issue comes up for someone else.

Thanks!

Jeff

@rens

The best way to get around the collision issue that you’re describing would likely be to set up the JSON data source as a URL feed, rather than using a remotely hosted file. This can be a bit tricky since some scripting will be required to update the JSON’s render-status post render since the feed will be read-only for Templater.

The upside to this sort of setup is that, theoretically, there shouldn’t be any way that Templater could end up attempting to write back to the Data Source at the same time it’s being updated by another process. That would alleviate any collision issues that could be causing the error that you’re seeing.

The other option would be to use an online Data Source like Google Sheets or our new QUE service since both of those options have features built in to the access controls to keep multiple processes from colliding during a render operation. The downside to those solutions is that we’d definitely need to update Templater to the latest version in order to use Google’s new API authentication method or the latest QUE features.

Let us know if you have any questions about any of these potential solutions, and we’ll do whatever we can to help with any issues that might arise.

Thanks,

Jeff

@jeff Thanks for the help!

I’ll be sending an email right now

@jeff Thank you for your assistance!

@pbretz

The short answer is yes, 2 Bots can definitely monitor the same sheet simultaneously. Typically the bot reserved column is used to split the work between two or more Bots to reduce the processing time for the project.

Depending on your setup, the main issue would be that each line of data will typically only be processed by one Bot. You’d either need to replicate the row of data in question or set up a system to change the bot and render-status values so that the backup Bot could process the same line.

I’d recommend taking a look at this article for more information on setting up a data source to be used with multiple Bots, and if you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know. Thanks!

SOLVED!
I had a layer being driven by Templater that had the same name as the comp it was in. So in my my case:
Comp name > DATE
Layer in that comp > DATE

To make it work, all I had to do was change the name of that comp to something different than the layer inside.

I guess Templator saw that comp as an empty layer, that’s why I was getting the “null is not an object” error.

It’s all a little over my head and I’m probably not explaining it correctly, but the people at Dataclay were very kind in helping me figure it out!

@darrencase render-status is the only Bot readiness control. In order to use a time value, you’d need to programmatically set up a way that at that given time, the render-status updates to ready.

@darrencase “id” is a reserved column name in Templater, and it is used for Templater to identify which object is being referenced. JSON ids.

Great, thanks Jon! That appears to have solved our problem - thank you!

FYI - we we’re using version 2.8.2. when we were having issues…

@v_47 You will want to make use of Bot’s command line interface, but you will effectively only be able to “push” data into the project files, rather than have Templater “watch” and “pull” data into the project file. See this thread to learn more about the differences. With the CLI, you can run Templater against any data set and any template simply by changing the templater-options.json file each time you invoke the CLI.

Alternatively, you could make use of the special aep column header in your sheet to switch between project files on a per-row basis, but when Bot is in “pull” mode, it watches a single data source. This means that multiple sheets would need to be pulled into a master sheet. Obviously this get a bit unwieldy. In that case, you could forgo the idea of a spreadsheet, and setup some kind of server that responded with JSON object arrays — each object in an array could have a different set of properties that would match to the various layers from different AEP files.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks!