[Paraview] Help file for Custom plugin NOT being included with Deployed ParaView.

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Folks,

I've made some progress on this. If anyone's interested in trying this
out, I've pushed my latest revision to branch
"12745_help_from_plugins" on the ParaView stage. It supports the
following:
* automatic generation of documentation from ServerManager XMLs
specified in ADD_PARAVIEW_PLUGIN macro e.g. Moments plugin
(ParaView/Plugins/Moments).
* adding custom html/png/jpg/css files as documentation for a plugin
by using DOCUMENTATION_DIR keyword in ADD_PARAVIEW_PLUGIN macro e.g.
SurfaceLIC plugin (ParaView/Plugins/SurfaceLIC).

I've changed the way documentation from XML was generated as well, by
removing the vtkSMExtractDocumentation executable, instead using
"xmlpatterns" command line tool distributed with Qt.

Currently, the plugin needs to be loaded on client side to work, but
the design supports loading the plugin on the server-side alone (I
just need to hookup the plumbing).

Any feedback is welcome.

Utkarsh

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Utkarsh Ayachit
<utkarsh.ayachit at kitware.com> wrote:
> FYI, this feature is under development :
> http://paraview.org/Bug/view.php?id=12745.
>
> The changes are not trivial, so it won't make into a patch but will be
> included in 4.0.
>
> Utkarsh
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Michael Jackson
> <mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> wrote:
>> It would seem that people writing plugins would want to provide some sort of help for their plugins but after looking through the Plugins directory that comes with ParaView I see that there are NO help files for any of those plugins which makes me think I am in the minority in this case.
>>
>>  It would seem that the first thing would be to push the generation of the documentation off until AFTER all the plugin CMake code has been run through. If this is possible (and easy) then moving forward with a mechanism to include help files becomes much easier. It almost is as easy as appending to PV_DOCUMENTATION_FILES. I would expect this could be included in a patch release for 3.12 if that occurs. If there is much more that needs to be done then 4.0 is probably a better target.
>>
>> Thoughts.
>> --
>> Mike Jackson <www.bluequartz.net>
>>
>> On Nov 21, 2011, at 2:53 PM, Utkarsh Ayachit wrote:
>>
>>> Mike,
>>>
>>> You're correct. This has been a long pending feature request. If
>>> there's enough interest in adding support for this, we can fix it for
>>> 4.0.
>>>
>>> Utkarsh
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Michael Jackson
>>> <mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> wrote:
>>>> It looks like currently there were not any provisions made to include a plugins help files into paraview directly. Looking through the CMake files the documentation is created _before_ the plugin CMake code is called so with out rearranging that cmake code there probably isn't any chance of having my documentation put in.
>>>>
>>>>  Or I am just plain missing something.
>>>> --
>>>> Mike Jackson <www.bluequartz.net>
>>>>
>>>> On Nov 21, 2011, at 1:44 PM, Michael Jackson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I have written a couple of plugins for ParaView and updated them for 3.12.0. I have an HTML file for each filter/reader/writer that I created that contains the documentation. How can I get those files included into ParaView so that if the user clicks the "?" button my HTML page will show up?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>> ___________________________________________________________
>>>>> Mike Jackson                    Principal Software Engineer
>>>>> BlueQuartz Software                            Dayton, Ohio
>>>>> mike.jackson at bluequartz.net              www.bluequartz.net
>>>>>
>>>>
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