ParaView Plugin

Installation

There are three components to the VisTrails plugin for ParaView. First, a patch to the ParaView source code is required, since ParaView does not provide the necessary access to its undo stack by default. Second, there is a standard ParaView plugin that will capture the actions that the user performs. Third, there is a plugin version of VisTrails.

ParaView Patch

ParaView must be compiled from source for the VisTrails plugin to work. The source code can be downloaded from here. Since there has been development on the undo stack in ParaView between the latest release (3.4) and the current cvs development version, there are two patches available.

• ParaView-3.4.0.patch
• ParaView-dev.patch

These patches can be installed with (use Cygwin on Windows):

cd ParaView3
patch -p0 < ParaView.patch

The BULID_SHARED_LIBS CMake variable must be set to ON, and ParaView can then be compiled as normal.

ParaView Plugin

The ParaView plugin also uses CMake to generate Visual Studio project files and make files. You may need to set the ParaView_DIR CMake variable to point to your ParaView source directory. The plugin can then be compiled, which creates 'VisTrails.dll' on Windows, and 'libVisTrails.so' on Linux. This can be loaded manually from within ParaView, or it can be copied to the ParaView plugins directory so it automatically gets loaded on startup.

VisTrails Plugin Version

Python 2.5 is required to run the plugin version of VisTrails. No compiling is necessary, though it must be placed in the correct directory so that the plugin can find it.

cd /path/to/paraview/executable/
mkdir plugins
cd plugins
cp -r /path/to/vistrails/plugin/version vistrails

Usage

• Data and state files are absolute - they must exist in the same location to replay any VisTrail operations

How it works

• Types of operations:
  • Generic changes that get put on the undo stack.
  • State file load.
    • Must be replayed from version 0 since these cannot be undone.
  • Anything else that doesn't get put on the undo stack will not be captured and therefore not replay correctly!
• ParaView / VisTrails message loops.

Known issues

• Has only been tested with local ParaView server configuration.
• Has only been tested on Windows.
• Loading ParaView with VisTrails already running.
  • VisTrails captures some initialization of ParaView.
  • Haven't seen this happen when the ParaView plugin spawns the VisTrails process itself.