[Paraview] Extending Broken in 2.6.0

[Mike Jackson]

--  
Mike Jackson   Senior Research Engineer
Innovative Management & Technology Services


On May 7, 2007, at 10:10 PM, David C Thompson wrote:

> First of all, I have to apologize... I did commit a fix to stop the
> LS-Dyna reader from printing crud out from within CanReadFile, but it
> apparently did not make it into the 2.6 branch. I've just sent a patch
> to Amy to be included if there are any more 2.6 releases.
>
>>> <rant>So basically you have to hack up paraview because someone can
>>> not put a file extension on a data file and we all get to incur that
>>> performance penalty.</rant>
> Yes, although I could make a similar rant along the lines of "You mean
> there are still applications that have to determine a file's type  
> by its
> extension?" or "You mean there are still file selection dialogs that
> won't let you choose a file because it happens to be a directory?"
>
>> Actually, the right way of dealing with this is assigning priorities
>> to readers and have paraview try readers in the order of priority.
>> LSDyna would have a priority of -infinity :-) I cannot guarantee we
>> would implement it quickly but I suggest putting in a feature request
>> for it.
> I would like to suggest an alternative: have readers register mime  
> types
> as well as file extensions. Then libmagic (see
> ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/file-4.20.tar.gz) or other OS-specific
> utilities (i.e., file attributes on MacOS X) could be used to find the
> proper reader without instantiating any readers and without the  
> overhead
> of calling many CanReadFile implementations on many files.
>
> 	David
>

I am a mac guy so I am all in favor of the world moving to a  
filesystem that supports resource forks, file types and file creator  
codes, but until that happens we all get to play in a world with file  
extensions.

  Here is the work around for those wishing to "fix" readers that  
insist on reading every file: I'll use the LSDyna Reader as an example:

Look in ParaView-2.6.1/GUI/Client/Resources/Readers.xml at line 931:  
Change the <Module .... > section to the following:

   <Module name="LSDynaReader"
           root_name="LSDynaReader"
           output="vtkMultiBlockDataSet"
           class="vtkPVAdvancedReaderModule"
           module_type="Reader"
           extensions=".d3plot .k .lsdyna"
           always_try_can_read="0"
           file_description="LSDyna">
     <Source class="vtkLSDynaReader"/>

Also note that there is an error on line 936. There is a missing "."  
before "d3plot". This should stop the LSDyna reader for reading files  
it shouldn't.

Recompile ParaView.

Cheers, Peace
Mike Jackson