[Paraview] beginner: dissapearing data in render view window

[Tomislav Maric]

Hello,

    I'm still having problems with dissapearing data in my RenderView
window.

I run the same thing in my stand alone python interpreter as well as in
pvpython, and I encounter the same problem.

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jun  6 2008, 23:32:27) 
[GCC 4.3.1 20080507 (prerelease) [gcc-4_3-branch revision 135036]] on
linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from paraview import servermanager
>>> connection = servermanager.Connect()
>>> sph = servermanager.sources.SphereSource()
>>> shrinkMe = servermanager.filters.ShrinkFilter(Input=sph)
>>> view = servermanager.CreateRenderView()
>>> rep = servermanager.CreateRepresentation(shrinkMe,view)
vtkSphereSource : [ ...........]
vtkShrinkFilter : [ ...........]
>>> view.StillRender()
vtkPainterPolyDataMapper : [ ...........]
vtkPVGeometryFilter : [ ...........]
vtkPVGeometryFilter : [ ...........]
vtkPainterPolyDataMapper : [ ...........]

    This gives me nicely shrink - filtered sphere, with my ViewSize = 
[100,100] and ViewPosition = [0,0], appearing on my screen.

    Then I click with my mouse on the console of the standalone
interpreter or the pvpython console, thus placing my RenderView vtk
window in the background on my desktop.


After that I write in the python console:

>>> view.ViewSize
Property name= ViewSize value = [400, 400]
>>> view.ViewSize = [600,600]
>>> view.ResetCamera()
>>> view.StillRender()
vtkPainterPolyDataMapper : [ ...........]
vtkPainterPolyDataMapper : [ ...........]

and this should change my rendering view window size, reset the camera
and render it on my screen. Nothing happens. 

I click on the vtk window in order to bring it to foreground, and i see
that the view window size has changed, but everything is black. 

I decide to save the image, so i execute:

>>> view.WriteImage('notAgain.png','vtkPNGWriter')
vtkPainterPolyDataMapper : [ ...........]
0

and something appears only for a fraction of a second. 
When I try to render the view again,

>>> view.StillRender()
vtkPainterPolyDataMapper : [ ...........]
>>> 


IT RENDERS FINE .

I am really new at all this, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong: I'm
following the book and the tutorials word by word. I really need help
with this, since I would like to use the scripting capability of
Paraview to automate animation process of simulation results on a large
cluster for my student project.

I thought I didn't update the visualisation pipeline, but from what I've
read in the Paraview Guide book, it updates automatically when rendering
occurs.

I'm running 32 bit OpenSUSE and Paraview3-3-cvs that came with OpenFOAM
1.5 installation.

Thank You.

Tomislav Maric