So correct me if I am wrong, but as I currently understand it .hda files are basically special zip files that contain 1 or more node definitions as well as any other data they have associated with them. This begs the question whether it is possible to have an empty .hda?

The reason I am asking is that my company's asset versioning system requires a file to publish, but won't tell you the version number until after the publish has been completed (in order to avoid version collisions due to the async nature of the transaction). This makes it so that I can't tell my assets their new node type name until after they are published since I use the namespace::name::version naming convention.

Currently I get around this issue by copying the definition into the hda under a temp name (which creates the hda file if it didn't exist), publishing the hda, getting the version number, building the correct asset name, copying the asset into the hda AGAIN but with the correct name, and finally deleting the asset with the temp name from the hda.

Not ideal.

It seems to me that if I could create an empty hda file, then I could copy the asset into it after the publish when I have all the info I need. Is this possible?