Simphony-Paraview

A plugin-library for the Simphony framework (http://www.simphony-project.eu/) to provide visualization support (using http://www.paraview.org/) of the CUDS highlevel components.

Build status Test coverage Documentation Status

Repository

Simphony-paraview is hosted on github: https://github.com/simphony/simphony-paraview

Requirements

  • paraview >= 3.14.1
  • simphony >= 0.2.1

simphony-paraview is known to work with paraview 3.14.1 (official) and paraview 4.1.0 (paraviewopenfoam) on Ubuntu 12.04 (precise). Installation instructions are provided below.

Paraview 3.14.1

sudo apt-get install paraview

ParaviewOpenFoam 4.1.0

sudo sh -c "echo deb http://www.openfoam.org/download/ubuntu precise main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openfoam.list"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install paraviewopenfoam410

Optional requirements

To support the documentation built you need the following packages:

Alternative running pip install -r doc_requirements.txt should install the minimum necessary components for the documentation built.

Installation

The package requires python 2.7.x, installation is based on setuptools:

# build and install
python setup.py install

or:

# build for in-place development
python setup.py develop

Testing

To run the full test-suite run:

python -m unittest discover

Documentation

To build the documentation in the doc/build directory run:

python setup.py build_sphinx

Note

  • One can use the –help option with a setup.py command to see all available options.
  • The documentation will be saved in the ./build directory.

Usage

After installation the user should be able to import the paraview visualization plugin module by:

from simphony.visualization import paraview_tools
paraview_tools.show(cuds)

FAQ

  • Paraview contains a separate python runtime called pvpython. which python should we use?

    simphony-paraview is tested and developed using the system python on Ubuntu 12.04. In theory one could install simphony and simphony-paraview on any other python 2.7.x runtime like pvpython, but you will need to build all dependencies against the pvpython runtime environment.

  • When using paraviewopenfoam and the system simphony-paraview does not work, whats wrong?

    Openfoam paraview does not make the provided python packages available to the system python thus in order to use the simphony-paraview plugin from the system python one needs to change the following environment variables:

    export PYTHONPATH=${PYTHONPATH}:/opt/paraviewopenfoam410/lib/paraview-4.1/site-packages/:/opt/paraviewopenfoam410/lib/paraview-4.1/site-packages/vtk
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/opt/paraviewopenfoam410/lib/paraview-4.1

Known Issues

  • Intermittent segfault when running the test-suite (#22)
  • Pressing a while interacting with a view causes a segfault (#23)
  • An Empty window appears when using the snapshot function (#24)

Directory structure

  • simphony-paraview – Main package code.
    • core – Utilities and basic conversion tools.
  • examples – Holds examples of visualizing simphony objects with simphony-paraview.
  • doc – Documentation related files:
    • source – Sphinx rst source files
    • build – Documentation build directory, if documentation has been generated using the make script in the doc directory.

User Manual