[Paraview] changes that affect plugins

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Ah yes, now  I remember. I think we meant to deprecate the support for
compiling in "external modules" in favor of the ability to add
plugins. I've updated
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Extending_ParaView_at_Compile_Time to
indicate the same.

In short, extending ParaView at compile time one now has to
exclusively use Plugin mechanism. Random compiling-in of code is no
longer supported.

Utkarsh


On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Michael Jackson
<mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> wrote:
> Here are a few of the issues that I have had with migrating a few plugins from ParaView 3.10 to 3.12:
>
> I now use EXTRA_EXTERNAL_PLUGIN_DIRS instead of EXTERNAL_MODULES.
>
> Where I used to have code in my cmake files such as:
> # -- Add the Server Manager XML
> PARAVIEW_INCLUDE_SERVERMANAGER_RESOURCES( "${H5Vtk_SM_XML}" )
> # -- Add the Client side xml
> PARAVIEW_INCLUDE_GUI_RESOURCES( "${H5Vtk_Client_XML}" )
> # -- Add the wrapped sources
> PARAVIEW_INCLUDE_WRAPPED_SOURCES("${H5Vtk_SM_Wrapped_SRCS}")
> # -- Add additional sources that are NOT wrapped
> PARAVIEW_INCLUDE_SOURCES ("${H5Vtk_SRCS}")
>
> I now have this code:
>    ADD_PARAVIEW_PLUGIN ("PVH5VtkPlugin" "1.0"
>        SERVER_MANAGER_SOURCES ${H5Vtk_Server_Wrapped_Sources}
>        SERVER_MANAGER_XML     ${H5Vtk_SM_XML}
>        SERVER_SOURCES         ${H5Vtk_Server_Sources}
>        GUI_RESOURCE_FILES     ${H5Vtk_Client_XML}
>        REQUIRED_ON_SERVER )
>
> I also have some Custom object panels I designed with QDesigner and I have found I need to add the following to the constructor:
>
>  QMetaObject::connectSlotsByName(this);
>
> in order to get the auto connect of signals/slots connected properly. After those changes the plugins now seem to be working correctly.
>
> The other comment I have is that the original CMake code I had to add a server side "plugin" really just added additional code to one of the PVFilters targets and then I compiled a separate plugin that had the gui code. The first iteration of changes had me creating actual plugins for both the server and client side which seemed even more confusing. After looking through some additional plugins in the ParaView source directory I was able to extract the needed cmake logic to compile the plugin with our without the GUI stuff included based on if ParaView was being compile with Qt support. I think this is the "preferred" way to do this now. If not, can someone with knowledge please comment.
>
> Hope that helps someone in the future.
> ___________________________________________________________
> Mike Jackson                    Principal Software Engineer
> BlueQuartz Software                            Dayton, Ohio
> mike.jackson at bluequartz.net              www.bluequartz.net
>
> On Oct 17, 2011, at 1:55 PM, Burlen Loring wrote:
>
>> Hi Utkarsh,
>>
>> Perhaps I was reading too much into recent posts by Michael Jackson <mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> about 3.12 changes that affected his plugins. I'm a bit defensive on this issue as over the past couple of years I can think of 3 changes that bit me. all showed up at run time and were difficult to debug. I thought it would be good to plan ahead for this release, make a pass through our plugins and catch any potential issues up front. Thanks for the link. Judging from your reply, it sounds like there won't be much to do this time :)
>>
>> Burlen
>>
>> On 10/17/2011 10:06 AM, Utkarsh Ayachit wrote:
>>> Burlen,
>>>
>>> What changes are you referring to?
>>> The changes to ServerManager have been documented at:
>>> http://paraview.org/ParaView3/images/2/24/ParaViewCollaborationChanges.pdf
>>>
>>> Reader/filter plugins should be unaffected for the most part.
>>>
>>> Utkarsh
>>>
>>> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Burlen Loring<bloring at lbl.gov>  wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> From a few of the recent posts it sounds like there are potentially
>>>> disruptive changes in 3.12 that could affect existing external plugins. It
>>>> would be very helpful if these changes were documented on the wiki as a
>>>> courtesy to plugin authors/maintainers. Any chance you have such a wiki page
>>>> already or would be willing to add one?
>>>>
>>>> Burlen
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>
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