[Paraview] Rendering a scene from a reader GUI while staying at background?

[Takuya OSHIMA]

Hi,

I am now trying to add a simple "watch a running simulation" feature
to my reader GUI. It works such that every time a QTimer times out a
rescan for new timesteps and the following piece of code are run

  // set animation time to the last timestep and render the scene
  QList<pqAnimationScene*> scenes
      = app->getServerManagerModel()->findItems<pqAnimationScene *>();
  foreach (pqAnimationScene *scene, scenes)
    {
    scene->setAnimationTime(latestTime);
    }

where latestTime is the time value of the last timestep pulled from
the reader proxy. The code itself works fine, but what annoys me a lot
is that whenever a new time step is detected the ParaView GUI pops up
to the foreground in order to render the scene, at least on OS X. I
would rather like to keep ParaView as a background task while watching
a simulation.

So here are my questions: is there any way that I can set the
animation time and render the scene like the code above, but while
staying at backgound? If yes, how is it possible?

Thanks,
Takuya

Takuya OSHIMA, Ph.D.
Faculty of Engineering, Niigata University
8050 Ikarashi-Ninocho, Nishi-ku, Niigata, 950-2181, JAPAN