Hello! I've been making full use of the Labs Digital Asset Manager.
It a great interface and really supports well organized hda management.

Whenever you version up, that new version becomes the preferred asset definition.
By en-large this is great and the norm, and makes deploying new hdas easy.

However, I recently came across a situation where I wanted to upversion and deploy, but did not want that to be the preferred version for the general population to use yet. In other words, I wanted them to be able to continue create new instances of nodes with the version they were using... and have the option to pick the newly deployed higher version when ready.

Its fine if the Labs HDA manager isn't a place for this, but I do need a way to configure a particular hda's preferred definition version 'globally' in my studios HFS package.

If I set the preferred definition on an hda locally myself via the traditional AssetManager... will that be picked up by all users automatically? ie When scanning hda's at load time, how does houdini know which one should be set as the preferred/current one? And where does one need to do that?

From the Asset Manager I discovered RMB > Show Namespace Order which pops up a read only dialog... along the lines of myhda::1.3 myhda::1.2 myhda::1.1 myhda::1.0

Maybe this is along the lines?
If I hit the current/lastest/next definition buttons it always takes me to the myhda::1.3.

Im looking for a way to set myhda::1.1 to current such that when I click the `current' button, the Asset Manager takes me to myhda::1.1 while if I click on 'latest' button, the Asset Manager takes me to myhda::1.3

It doesn't look possible from the context menu on the operator path to simply RMB > make this namespaced hda version the current one (and deploy that to all users)..

Is there a config/op file I should be looking for somewhere?

HOUDINI_OPNAMESPACE_HIERARCHY looks like it should do the trick

You can add a fully-qualified name to the list to make it take precedence even over a later version. For example, adding com.sundae::vines::1.0 to the list would make Houdini use that for an ambiguous vines reference, even if com.sundae::vines::2.0 is available.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/assets/namespaces.html [www.sidefx.com]

hmm, no luck. I tried to add myhda::1.1 to HOUDINI_OPNAMESPACE_HIEARCHY in my .json package... the variable is recognized, but tabbing in the node still instantiates the highest namespaced version. Also tried prefixing the operator with :: and still no difference.

Also tried without success to use an OPcustomize file to ophide/opexclude the highest versioned namespace. This just hides all definitions.

maybe this isn't possible, and I have to actually remove the highest version?

(H19.0.455 / Windows)

ok, I've relented to deleting the highest version and using the interface to create a separate author::dev namespace with Display Branch in Label.

This creates a (dev) label in the tab menu, allows for both instances to coexist in the node network, and does in face appear at the bottom of the asset dropdown -- which largely solves the preferred definition issue.

When no longer "in dev" it can be pushed to the highest version - which it appears, is the only definition that will be instantiated per optype.

I found your post very useful. Thanks for keeping the topic updated despite the lack of answers.