[Paraview] Live Annotation

[John Biddiscombe]

> The data file contains the date/time of each time step.  Currently, my 
> reader just ignores it.

I have some data which also displays time as a string, if your reader 
put the time values (as numbers) into the TimeStepValues array during 
the UpdateInformation phase, then the Paraview Gui can convert timestep 
T into numerical value "X", in a Qt GUI, I use this

std::string QDateTimeToString(const QDateTime &dt, bool pad=true) 

{
   std::string d1 = dt.date().toString(Qt::ISODate).toAscii().data();
   std::string t1 = dt.time().toString(Qt::ISODate).toAscii().data();
   if (pad) return std::string("'") + d1 + std::string(" ") + t1 + 
std::string("' ");
   else return d1 + std::string(" ") + t1;
}


where the numerical value X referred to above is the Qt::ISODate value 
of the time/date I want to display.

if kwsys::SystemTools had a feature to convert a string to an ISO date 
number and vice versa (similar to the Qt function I've used above), then 
adding one flag to the XML timehelper, "TimeAsDateString" (or maybe 
(TimeAsTimeString", "TimeAsDateTimeString" option), would make the job 
of displaying the time value as date/time very easy to implement inside 
paraview.

Just thinking out loud.

JB