[Paraview-developers] Interaction with server data within client plugin

[Matthias Schneider]

Hi,

I'm trying to implement an extension for Paraview but I'm somewhat stuck 
with the client/server and ServerManager concepts used in Paraview. 
Maybe someone could give a hint where to find some more information on 
that. I was looking at the plugin examples but that didn't help me too much.

What I do not understand is how to establish some kind of data transfer 
between the server and the client. A very simple example that I was 
trying to implement is as follows: For a vtkPolyDataSet source define a 
point id via a GUI element and set the rotation center of the active 
view to the coordinate of this point.

Based on the DockWidget example and the SelectionInspector I was able to 
create the GUI elements on the client side to select an appropriate 
source on the server side and get access to the active view. What I do 
not understand is how to interact with the actual data of the source to 
read the spatial coordinates of the user-defined vertex.

On the client side I use a pqOutputPortComboBox to select the source 
which gives access to the current pqOutputPort/pqPipelineSource.
 From this I get a vtkSMSourceProxy/vtkPVDataInformation which allows me 
to read basic information of the data as shown in Paraview's statistics 
inspector (no. of cells/points, memory size, bounds, ...).

Can anybody give me a hint how to do this properly? Any help is 
appreciated very much.

Thanks,
Matthias