[Paraview] Question about plugins with Catalyst and Python scripts

[yvan.fournier at free.fr]

Hello,

We have been using Catalyst (with Python coprocessing scripts) in our code for quite a while now, and am trying to see how to make thing more user-friendly.

One of the main issues we have is that if plugins are loaded in ParaView when using the Coprocessing Generator plugin, extra lines regarding those plugins may appear in the script, even when not dreclty used. For example, when the PointSprite plugins is enabled in PV 5.1, it adds opacity transfer function informations. This particular example might not be relevant to PV 5.4 with integrated PointGaussian, but other plugins may add similar entries, whether used or not in a particular view.

This causes issues using Catalyst, as those plugins are not enabled in Catalyst (even using a full ParaView install with OSMesa as Catalyst, not editions, often too incomplete).

One solution is to remove the "offending" lines (i.e. run once, check lines reported in error logs, removec those, run again, ...) which while not complicated, tends to scare users and requires multiple additional iterations to setup a visualization.

A better solution would be to allow loading of plugins from the Python script (especially as I expect it would allow using plugins such as SurfaceLIC from within Catalyst), but I can't find any documentation for this. I seem to remember some people from Kitware mentioning this was possible in a live discussion I had, but have no additional details.

Is there a way to tell ParaView/Catalyst to load a particular plugin from within a Python script ? IF yes, what's the syntax ?

Best regards,

   Yvan