[vtk-developers] Handling invalid vtp files

[Berk Geveci]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Will Schroeder
<will.schroeder at kitware.com>wrote:

> Another option here is to create a filter (or family of filters) that can
> be inserted into the pipeline to check for validity (there could be
> different sorts of checks). The filter could be removed, or disabled with a
> flag, once the application is being tuned for performance and the data is
> known to be good. In my mind these validity checks are more like debugging
> tools and should be able to easily removed when debugging is complete.


I somewhat disagree. Yes, these are debugging tools BUT they shouldn't be
always optional. If I am a scientists who wants to load a dataset that I
wrote using my code and ParaView crashes somewhere far far downstream, how
am I supposed to know that my file is wrong? I would probably send a message
to the mailing list, then some poor developer would ask for the file and
debug and then find out that I don't know how to read the file format spec.
That's assuming that the file is not 20 GB or something. If, instead, the
reader said:

 - Hey dude, there is something wrong with this file, please read the file
format spec. Also, to debug this further, you can use this nice program that
can give you more details about the problem.

then the user wouldn't even have to come to the mailing list.

-berk
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