[vtk-developers] Patch for vtkCocoaRenderWindowInteractor TerminateApp behavior

[Sean McBride]

On Fri, 3 Aug 2012 11:36:00 -0400, Pat Marion said:

>The PCL community uses VTK as their visualization engine.  They are
>interested in using VTK render windows that can enter, leave, and restart
>interaction loops.  They've encountered an inconsistent behavior OSX, and I
>tracked it down to an issue in vtkCocoaRenderWindowInteractor.
>
>Attached is a test program that makes repeated calls to interactor Start()
>and TerminateApp().  The test creates a render window and calls interactor
>Start().  You can press 'Q' to trigger TerminateApp(), causing the
>interactor to return from Start() and begin a new loop. The test exhibits
>different behavior on Linux vs. OSX.  On Linux, it successfully restarts
>the interaction loop, but on OSX the render window is destroyed after the
>first loop.  I'm told the behavior on Windows is consistent with Linux, but
>I did not test there.
>
>I attached a patch for vtkCocoaRenderWindowInteractor.  In this patch,
>TerminateApp() will break the NSApplication run loop, but not destroy the
>NSWindow.  I think this makes OSX behave similarly to the Xt implementation
>on Linux.  Can someone who is familiar with vtkCocoaRenderWindowInteractor
>take a look at the patch?  Thanks!

Pat, others,

Pathetically, it has taken me a whole year to get around to this :(, but please see here:

<http://review.source.kitware.com/12200>

for a patch that does the above (based on your patch) and a bunch of other related (and unrelated) cleanup of the Cocoa code.

The changes are non-trivial, so I'd appreciate if anyone with an interest in VTK + Cocoa give this some good testing before I merge it.

Cheers,

-- 
____________________________________________________________
Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com 
Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada