[Paraview] Some information about extending paraview functionalities

[Moreland, Kenneth]

Difference between filters and plugins:  Filters are the computational units in VTK and ParaView.  They are connected together to form pipelines.  In ParaView, the available filters are listed in the Filters menu.  Plugins are a mechanism to add functionality to ParaView.  That often includes adding filters to the Fitlers menu, but could also include a number of other things such as new menus, views, or python scripts.

In ParaView there are actually two distinct versions of Python scripting which I usually labels as client-side scripting and server-side scripting.  Client-side scripting is used to automate the operations that you would typically do through the ParaView GUI.  It does not really interface directly with the VTK Python wrappings that you use.  Client-side scripting is described on this Wiki page: http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Python_Scripting

Server-side scripting is run directly in the pipeline via the Programmable Filter.  To use it, you basically create a Programmable Filter and throw your Python code inside it.  In this form of scripting you are directly interfacing with the VTK Python wrappers.  Server-side scripting is described on this Wiki page: http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Python_Programmable_Filter

The plugin page concerning embedding Python that you pointed to is a convenience for plugins that provide or use client-side scripts.  It is not useful for server-side scripting because that Python code does not have access to the loaded modules.  (Or at least, I don't think that they do.)

-Ken

On 4/9/10 4:32 AM, "Luca Penasa" <luca.penasa at email.it> wrote:

Hi everybody,
        Maybe some of my question could be answered with some 'googling', but i
would like to make the point on some problems i have encountered. Thanks
to everybody!

this is my problem:

In the last months i learned the basis of the vtk library (that is
simply a wonderful tool!!) and i am using the python wrappings for my
applications. I have writed a python module with several functions for
doing operations on point clouds.

At this point i am using paraview ONLY for view the results of my python
code...

Now i would like to make a step forward, and begin to implement my code
into the paraview gui, maybe as a filter or plugin (sorry, but i did not
clearly understand the difference!?), so i could import my data in
paraview and do the same operations i am currently doing from the python
shell. It would be great if i could extend paraview-gui functionalities
for setting the parameters and execute the functions i writed in
python...

So i found this page:
http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/Plugin_HowTo#Embedding_Python_Source_as_Modules

but i cannot understand if what i want to do is actually possible or
not..

Anybody can give me some clarifications?
If it is possible, is there a place where to find some examples?

Sorry for my english, i hope you understand what i mean!

Thank you!

--
---------------------------
Luca Penasa
Student at Geosciences Dpt.
University of Padua (IT)
luca.penasa at email.it
---------------------------



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   ****      Kenneth Moreland
    ***      Sandia National Laboratories
***********
*** *** ***  email: kmorel at sandia.gov
**  ***  **  phone: (505) 844-8919
    ***      web:   http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel

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