[Paraview] Wish list

[Robert Ferrell]

I generated a short(?) wish-list of capabilities I'd like to see added
to ParaView.  I thought I'd share it with this list.

I must start with the proviso that I find ParaView extremely useful.
The ParaView team has delivered a great tool that myself and others on
my team use extensively.  I recognize that only so much can be done,
and since I am working on other things, I am not offering to help
implement any of the requests I'm making.  This is simply a wishlist,
which might be helpful for others to choose where to put development
effort.

Here goes.

Time Series
====================
I'm using .pvd files with version 1.2 to display time series.  This
works fairly well.  There are some enhancements that would be helpful,
though.  In order of desirability.

1. Look for an attribute such as SimulationTime in each DataSet and
allow me to display that somewhere on the image.  That way I could
easily see what simulation time I'm looking at. My time steps are
rarely uniformly spaced in time, so there is no simple mapping between
frame number and time value.

2. Rather than just looking for a single attribute such as
SimulationTime, let me include any number of attributes in the DataSet
element, and give me some way to tell ParaView that I want to display
some or all of those.  I often have a number of global attributes
associated with a time step, for instance ComputationalStep and
ExternalTemperature, and I'd like to display those values in the
image.  A series of check boxes allowing me to choose which ones to
display would be great.

3. When I read in a .pvd file I get a slider that allows me to choose
the time step.  I'd like sliders for other DataSet attributes,
particularly SimulationTime.

4. In the image, rather than just display the global attributes, such
as SimulationTime, as a scalar, I'd like a thermometer type gauge that
indicates how far through my time series I am.  In addition to static
information, when I animate the time series that thermometer would
give an indication of how quickly simulation time is advancing.  In
know this won't be ideal, since my timesteps can vary between 1000
seconds and a millisecond.

Data Interrogation
====================
I haven't had much luck using the line probe.  Among other things, I'd
like a line which changes with my animation.  Also, I can't figure out
how to tell it which field to plot.  And, it would be great if I could
display a few probed values in the image view.

I'd also like to be able to interogate along a contour and generate a
line plot.

Finally, it would be really nice if I could enter a mode where I could
mouse around and interrogate field values interactively.


-robert