@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!