[vtkusers] separating CellData and PointData from Cells and Points in XML format?

[Dan Lenski]

Hi all,
I am using Paraview to visualize large time-series of data from materials 
simulations.  I've used the file-formats.pdf documentation to convert our 
simulator's file format to VTK's VTU unstructured grid format (with 
base64 encoding and zlib compression for the arrays).

The output of our simulation consists of a static mesh (cell and node 
coordinates don't change) onto which a changing set of node data is 
superposed.  It is thus quite wasteful of space and load time for me to 
repeat the mesh data in every VTU file.  I am wondering if it's possible 
to put the <Cells> and <Points> sections of the VTU file into separately 
files which are referenced from the main file, something like this:

<VTKFile...>
    <Piece...>
        <Cells>
             <ExternalFile filename="cells.vtk"/>
        </Cells>
        <Points>
             <ExternalFile filename="points.vtk"/>
        </Points>
        <CellData>
             <DataArray ...>
             1 2 3 4 5 6  7  8  29 29 93993 9 84949 9
             </DataArray>
        </CellData>
        <PointData>
             <DataArray ...>
             1 2 3 4 5 6  7  8  29 29 93993 9 84949 9
             </DataArray>
        </PointData>
    </Piece>
</VTKFile>

Does VTK offer any way to reference external files like this in its XML 
file formats?

I have looked at the documentation for the Parallel file formats, and 
they seem to only offer the ability to split the whole dataset into 
chunks, but not to separate the different XML elements of the dataset...

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Dan Lenski