ParaView/Users Guide/Scripting ParaView

The ParaView client provides an easy to use GUI in which to visualize data with the standard window, menu, button controls. Driving ParaView with a mouse is intuitive but not easily reproducible and exact as is required for repetitive analysis and scientific result reproducibility. For this type of work it is much better to use ParaView's scripted interface. This is an an alternative control path, that works alongside of or as a replacement for the GUI.

ParaView's native scripted interface uses the Python programming language. The interface allows one to programatically control ParaView's back end data processing and rendering engines. Note that this level of control is distinct from the Python Programmable Filter discussed in the Quantitative Analysis Chapter. That is a white box filter, that runs in parallel within the server and has direct access to each individual element of the data. Here we are discussing client side python control, where you control the entire pipeline, which may or may not include Python Programmable Filters.

In this chapter we discuss first ParaView's python scripted interface, which follows the same idioms as and thus be operated similarly to the way one works, in the GUI. Next we discuss the ParaView's python tools, which make it even easier to use ParaView python scripts including the ability to record script files from GUI actions and to augment the GUI with them. Lastly we discuss batch processing with ParaView.