[Paraview-developers] ANN: ParaView Views and Representations Refactoring

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Folks,

Some of the most complicated components of the ParaView ServerManager
have always been the Views and Repressentations. Now, that's not
without good reason, they are indeed complex given the different
scenarios and configurations and settings and modes that they are
supposed to operate in. Developers writing views esp. render views and
representation indeed have to be aware of all the nuances regarding
data movement and distribution. Additionally developers had to
construct complicated pipelines in ServerManager level making the code
hard to read and customize. If anyone has undertaken an exercise of
creating a special render view type, you'll know exactly what I am
talking about.

As the most recent avatar of the Views and Representations was being
developed, VTK, inspired by ParaView views, built its own set of views
and representations. It became apparent that even though
views/representations will never be free of complex pipelines, the
pipelines and much easier to understand and debug in the VTK world for
the developers.

For the past few weeks, we have been working on revising ParaView's
views and representations to be more VTK-centric and minimize the
complexity in the ServerManager layer. I'll be committing those
changes soon. This does imply that any existing view and
representations you may have developed will no longer work, however it
should be fairly easy to convert them to the new style.

I've started writing a Wiki page:
http://paraview.org/ParaView3/index.php/Views_And_Representations

More details to follow.

There are some know regressions with this commit eg. outline/LOD
delivery to client in tile-display mode isn't working, save geometry
isn't working etc. These issues will be ironed out before the next
release.

If you see any other regressions, please let us know. Some turmoil is
indeed expected on the dashboard for a few days after a commit of this
magnitude.

Utkarsh