FAQ

Also check our Known Issues page for troubleshooting.

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How can I run a workflow using the command line?

Call vistrails using the following options:

python vistrails.py -l -b path_to_vistrails_file -w pipeline

Where pipeline is a version number or a tag.

How can I save an image from the spreadsheet?

While having the focus on a spreadsheet cell press "Ctrl" (on Windows) and select the camera to take a snapshot. The system will prompt you for the location and file name where it should be saved. The other icons can be used for saving multiple images that can be used for generating an animation on demand.

How can I integrate my own program into VisTrails?

The easiest way is to create a package. Writing a package is often very simple, here are instructions on how to do it: UsersGuideVisTrailsPackages

Given a VTK visualization, how can I generate a webpage from it?

Check out the html pipeline in offscreen.xml.

Using the command line, we'd like to execute a workflow multiple times, with slightly different parameters, and create a series of output files. Is this possible?

Starting in rev 444, we can change parameters that have an alias through the command line.

For example, offscreen pipeline in offscreen.xml always creates the file called image.png. If you want generate it with a different filename:

python vistrails.py -l -b ../examples/offscreen.xml -w offscreen -a"filename=other.png"

filename in the example above is the alias name assigned to the parameter in the value method inside the String module. When running a pipeline from the command line, VisTrails will try to start the spreadsheet automatically if the pipeline requires it. For example, this other execution will also start the spreadsheet:

python vistrails.py -l -b ../examples/head.xml -w aliases -a"isovalue=30,Diffuse_Color_R=0.8,Diffuse_Color_G=0.4,Diffuse_Color_B=0.2"

I can load a vistrail, and the version tree shows up fine. However, no pipelines appear when I click on a version. What gives?

The most likely reason is that the vistrail uses a package that is not registered with VisTrails. You need to identify the needed package and add it to your .vistrails/startup.py. A single line like the following should be enough:

addPackage('enter_package_name_here')

Some packages might need more information. For example:

addPackage('afront', executable_path='/path/to/afront')

Refer to the package documentation for details. The one inconvenient step is that currently there's no automated way to describe what is the missing package. We're working on this feature for future releases.