[Paraview] Adding/writing paraview filters

[David Doria]

 Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 3:41 PM, pat marion <pat.marion at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> The paraview devel list is paraview-developers at paraview.org.  It used
> to be private but now it is public.  I was subscribed internally by
> Kitware, I'm not sure where the public sign up is located.
>
>
>>   <SourceProxy name="TransformFilter" class="vtkTransformFilter"
>>    label="Transform">
>>
>> 1) What is a source proxy? This filter will use the vtkTransformFilter
>> filter, and it will be called "Transform" in the paraview menu.
>
> There is a method vtkSMProxy* vtkSMProxyManager::NewProxy (const char
> * groupName, const char* proxyName).  Calling this with group=sources
> and name=TransformFilter will create a new vtkSMSourceProxy.  So
> basically "vtkSM" is prepended to the xml element name to create a
> class name.  vtkSMSourceProxy is the base class for all sources such
> as readers and filters.  For most cases vtkSMSourceProxy is
> sufficient, you can control the vtk filter completely through
> Properties defined on the source proxy.  But if you look in
> rendering.xml you'll see a lot of xml elements that are just plain old
> <Proxy/> (corresponding to vtkSMProxy) or more fancy ones like
> <RenderViewProxy/> (corresponding to vtkSMRenderViewProxy).  In cases
> of things like vtkSMRenderViewProxy, the class is created to handle
> extra logic that is not handled simply through Properties.
>
> When you create the transform filter in the paraview gui, only the
> vtkSMSourceProxy is created on your machine, the vtkTransformFilter
> might be living on a server somewhere else (unless you are in builtin
> mode of course).  Setting a property on the source proxy causes a
> method to be called on the vtkTransformFilter on the server.
>
> Sorry I can't answer all your questions right now, but it's a start.
>
> Pat

Thanks Pat,

This actually helps quite a bit - looking through those classes I now
have a bit of an idea of the proxies. Only 934 questions left (haha)!
I really think this is worth annotating so we can post a little
developers guide like this somewhere.

Thanks,

David