[Paraview] Concept: A world without the Apply button

[Samuel Key]

All--

Technical reasons aside, my own simulation efforts (software that relies 
on ParaView for post-processing) span a great variety of solid and 
structural mechanics applications. The software is not a 
single-formulation, single-solution, one-off problem solver.

Put briefly, I find the "Apply" button exceptionally useful.

The EnSight-formatted results files produced contain a surfeit (excess) 
of simulation results for any one application. I use the "Apply" button 
on loading results files for several purposes:

1) Load only results that are most useful to the current problem or 
application.

2) Limit the results I examine to those relevant to the phase st hand:
      i) Phase 1. Are the results OK (BC's OK? Energy Balance OK? 
Loading OK?)
     ii) Phase 2. Which result describes the response most effectively?
    iii) Phase 3. Presentation animations and figures for communicating.

3) Frequent tuning of various filters to refine the display of the 
results being studied.

4) Last but not least, limit the results being examined at any one 
session to avoid the MS O/S crashing PV because of the MS O/S limits on 
resources usable.

Thanks for the opportunity to express my support for ParaView and its 
exceptional versatility and effectiveness as a post-processing tool.

Sam Key

On 6/7/2011 8:56 AM, Moreland, Kenneth wrote:
> One thing that strikes me about this proposal, is that it relies a lot on
> VTK readers/filters providing the necessary meta data, particularly about
> fields.  For example, the elevation filter would have to report in its
> meta data that it will be adding a scalar field named Elevation.  That
> sounds easy enough to implement, but would have to be independently added
> for all readers/filters.  This would be especially problematic for
> user-provided plugins.
>
> Is there a way to mitigate the issues with the meta data mismatching what
> is actually generated?  Perhaps there could be a check to make sure that
> the data generated matches the meta data previously reported and issue a
> warning if there are any mismatches.  This would not solve the problem per
> se, but would quickly alert developers to problems and make it easier to
> debug.
>
> -Ken
>
>     ****      Kenneth Moreland
>      ***      Sandia National Laboratories
> ***********
> *** *** ***  email: kmorel at sandia.gov
> **  ***  **  phone: (505) 844-8919
>      ***      web:   http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel
>
>
>
>
> On 6/1/11 1:30 PM, "Utkarsh Ayachit"<utkarsh.ayachit at kitware.com>  wrote:
>
>> Folks,
>>
>> I have been investigating the ability to create pipelines in ParaView
>> without having to hit Apply at every single stage in the pipeline.
>> This would make it much easier to deal with really large data in a
>> usage scenario where the scientist is fairly familiar with the
>> visualization pipeline he's interested in setting up.
>>
>> Following the recent changes to the ParaView ServerManager, the
>> ServerManager level requirement that filters need to be updated before
>> connecting has disappeared. However, we still need to "Apply" to get
>> updated information about arrays etc.
>>
>> After a couple on discussions with Berk and Dave, I've consolidated
>> the thoughts on a Wiki page. If any one has any thoughts to share, it
>> would be great.
>>
>> http://www.paraview.org/ParaView3/index.php/No-Apply_Mechanism_for_Creatin
>> g_Pipelines
>>
>> Note that this is merely a concept. We have no plans of implementing
>> it in near future (3.12/4.0).
>>
>> Utkarsh
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