Ramses Daemon API

The Ramses Daemon is a local server used by the Ramses Add-ons to get and set data to the client (which in turn may communicate with the Ramses Server to sync data) and the whole system.

The Ramses Daemon is automatically run by the Ramses Application, which is the beating heart of Ramses.

Connecting to the Daemon

Add-ons can communicate with the Daemon through a standard TCP Socket. The Daemon listens on port 18185¹ by default (but this can be adjusted in the Ramses Application settings), and is automatically started by the Ramses Application. It is terminated when the client quits. To avoid conflicts, it may be temporarily suspended when the client is syncing data with the Ramses Server but all requests are queued and all of them should be processed.

Most of the Ramses data can only be accessed if a user is logged-in in the Ramses Application, thus before communicating with the Daemon, a Ramses Add-on must check if the Application (and its Daemon) is running (or start it), and if a user is logged-in.

The initial connection to the Daemon usually follows these steps:

1. Check if the Daemon is running by sending the ping query.
   1. If the Daemon replies, connection is ready
   2. Else, try to start the Application and ping again.
2. Check the version of the Daemon which is part of the reply to the ping.
3. Check if a user is logged-in (this is also part of the reply to the ping); if not, show an alert and raise the Ramses Application window.

After these steps, other queries can be used to get or set new data and information.

Communicating with the Daemon

Queries

Add-ons can post queries with the form of a standard form-encoded URL query; they are a single-line string of key=value pairs (the value may be optional) seperated by the & character. They should be encoded in UTF-8. There’s no need to enclose strings in quotes.

Example queries:

ping

getProjects

setCurrentProject&uuid=unique-uid

Replies

The Daemon replies with a JSON object (encoded in UTF-8) which contains the following attributes:

• accepted: boolean. True if the Daemon has recognized the query and accepted it. Will be False if the query does not exist.
• success: boolean. True if the Daemon has successfully processed the query, False in case of any error.
• message: string. A human-readable feedback about the result, which can be shown to the user by the Add-on. It contains explanation about the error, if any.
• query: string. The query that was made that the Daemon is replying to.
• content: object. The actual content of the reply, which varies depending on the query. Read this reference for more details.

A reply looks like this:

{
    "accepted": true,
    "query": "ping",
    "success": true,
    "message": "Hi, this is the Ramses Daemon.",
    "content": {
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "ramses": "Ramses",
        "userUuid": "unique-uid"
    }
}

Objects and their data

In Ramses, everything is represented by Objects. An object consists of a Unique Universal Identifier (UUID) used to identify them across the whole system, and its associated data, encoded as a JSON Object.

Ramses Objects (i.e. RamObjects) can represent a shot, an asset, a user, an application, or a whole project for example. They can also contain lists of other objects. Lists of objects are basic string lists of UUIDs stored in the parent object data.

UUIDs and object data are synced by all the Ramses Applications and a Ramses Server, and are mirrored on all workstations and the server itself. Any other software (e.g. APIs, scripts, plugins…) should get the list of objects and all data using this Ramses Daemon run by the Ramses Application which is guaranteed to be up-to-date. You can also use the Daemon to set new data to specific objects.

Data can be retrived and updated with these two simple queries: getData and setData.