[Paraview-developers] Proposal for testing Lookmarks

[Stanton, Eric T]

Greetings,

As a step towards improving the quality of the lookmark code, I'd like
to get the go-ahead to add the following lookmark commands to every
paraview tcl test script in the .../GUI/Testing/Tcl directory just
before the image comparison takes place.

# Lookmark Test
set lookmarkManager [[ $Application GetMainWindow ]
GetPVLookmarkManager]
set lookmark [$lookmarkManager CreateLookmark name-of-test 0]
[ $Application GetMainWindow ] DeleteAllSources
$lookmark View
$lookmarkManager Withdraw

I have run the tests with these commands added and have identified and
fixed several bugs in lookmarks involving incompatibility with certain
kinds of readers, incorrect coloring of actors, etc. The built in image
comparison is ideal for checking that a lookmark has worked correctly
since the idea of a lookmark is to take you back to the exact view you
left off at. 

There are still a handful of tests for which creating and viewing a
lookmark fails (those involving animation, group input widgets) and some
for which they don't make sense. I will only commit tests that have
succeeded on the machines I've tested and continue to debug the others. 

I have written a couple tcl scripts that do the adding and removing of
lookmark commands. They can be run when a new test is added to the
directory. 

I am also working on another testing option in which the lookmark test
script will open unmodified test scripts, add the lookmark commands to a
temp file, then run the modified temp script. There are some issues with
this however that are still being worked out.

The downside to all this is that it increases the testing time. But I
think the benefit of improving the quality of lookmark code outweighs
the costs.

I am also open to any suggestions anyone might have.

Regards,

Eric Stanton
Sandia National Laboratories
Data Analysis and Visualization
505-284-4422