Time Implementation

The new time support in VTK is described here. The important things to note:

• Discrete as well as contiguous time values are supported
• Update time has to be requested by the final consumer (usually mapper, i.e. display in paraview)
• Some algorithms may request more than 1 time step.

In ParaView 2, the time is controlled by a widget that belongs to the readers object inspector. This does not work well with the new time support as the time is no longer a parameter of the reader but rather something that needs to be set at the end of the pipeline. Here is how I am thinking of implementing time in ParaView 3.

Time as a property of displays/views

Each display will have a time property. By default, these will be linked to a time property of the view that contains them. Furthermore, the time property of all views will be linked to a global time property. The time of the active display will be displayed on the toolbar.

Whether a time index or a time value is shown on the toolbar widget will depend on the time selection mode (should this be part of the toolbar or a menu?). It will be possible to break the time property link between the active view and the global time to property (how is this related to the general property link editor property?). This will allow users to display different timesteps in different views. To have 2 different readers with different time steps in the same view, the user will have to apply the vtkTemporalShiftScale filter.