[Paraview-developers] Testing external plugins

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

David,

We don't really have a good support to add tests totally externally
(out of paraview's source dir).

> + Running ParaView with "-dr" means that the plugin must be loaded as part of the test script... but the path to this is system dependent, so I would have to hand-edit test scripts to change the full library path to  @pattern@ and run configure_file() on each one. Or is there some better way to load a plugin during a test?

We'll need to add some infrastructure to support loading plugins from
command line (or something like that) and then your test can load the
plugin at startup.

> + How should ParaView be invoked? It doesn't look like ParaViewConfig.cmake specifies the location of the ParaView executable. It does record the paths to pvbatch, pvpython, and all the server executables, but not the GUI... and that apparently needs to be provided to smTestDriver via "--client". For that matter, it doesn't look like ParaViewConfig.cmake is installed anywhere.

This will be much easier following the changes that coming to ParaView
soon (ParaView Modularization). paraview, pvserver etc are targets
exported from ParaView and hence external project can add test by
simply referring to the target name in add_test(NAME.. COMMAND ..)
calls.

Utkarsh