Quick question on the back end of the Dynamo Package loader. We are using a shared network location for office wide packages, I have a little concern that users may be also installing the packages on their local computer (which I am going to disable for the average user).
However I’m curious what happens, if the version of a package or version of a node differs on the local and the network location. Which node will it use? Is there a way to prioritize the network location?
This was a big problem for us. I recal that it defaults to the first path listed in the settings, so if the C drive is first than that takes precedence as those packages are loaded first, then the network. However, in some cases when two of the same or even just similar packages are in both directories, the package won’t load on the next launch. Users can manually open a node from the package and Dynamo will use the version of the package which was opened from. This was very troublesome when I would open a graph at a coworker’s system to see Archilab, Clockwork, Steam, Rhythm, Bakery and pretty much every other node from a major package was missing, and the packages absent from the library entirely despite having been run on the same system a few hours prior.
When it was just one package on one machine it wasn’t bad. But once it started to become that many… I started going so far as to avoid package use in graphs entirely if it would be reused - opting instead to open them, copy the contents, paste into my graph, and edit them. Obviously this sucked, took more time to build graphs, made for a lot of revisiting and changing things as Dynamo updated, limited functionality (can’t set lacing to longest easily on that long series of functions like you can with a custom node), and was generally lame.
Once we narrowed the issue we started saying ‘no C drive packages’ for most users, and tailoring graphs to use Dynamo player based on the network. Some users only have read access as well for the package directory, though we may have loosened that restriction some. Exceptions come into play for a few unique situations where the package needs to be on the C drive. Ladybug comes to mind as one such example. Generally these were specialized, so only needed by a few people who were taught specifically to limit what they installed there. The network was the first location in those cases.