Try out VCS plots

[remram44]

Getting a simple plot working should be pretty easy, but:

• We definitely want to catch up to VisTrails master (Get VisTrails patches in VisTrails master #17; @remram44 working on this)
• We are probably going to run into Overlay flickers on VTK cells #13 (these are VTK cells)
• Need a programmatic way to define plots (instead of subworkflows)
• Need to integrate into UV-CDAT's build system to get the cdms/vtk/vcs stuff

[rexissimus]

I was able to run DAT with the UV-CDAT libraries by sourcing UV-CDAT. I just had to add tdparser. VTK does not work, but should once we are using VisTrails master.

I created a simple CDMS Variable and a VCS boxplot that plots in a separate window. Integrating the VCS plots with the DAT spreadsheet looks like the hard part. When that is working it should be straightforward to improve the variables and plots.

Since UV-CDAT is using newer libraries it may be worth checking if VCS works with the DAT spreadsheet before looking at #13?

[remram44]

Since UV-CDAT is using newer libraries it may be worth checking if VCS works with the DAT spreadsheet

Do you mean VTK? I think that all VCS plots are embedded as VTKCells.

The merge with master is taking a very long time, I end up manually applying nearly every one of the DAT patches. To be honest I don't know if I'll be done by tomorrow's meeting.

[remram44]

I dropped the code from uvcdat & uvcdat_cdms into a uvcdat_cdms package (branch dat-uvcdat). I just have one variable loader (CDMSVariable from .nc file) and one plot (CDMS3D_Scalar). It seems to work on Linux. As you said I only had to install tdparser in the CDAT environment.

[remram44]

On my macbook:

ERROR: In /Users/remirampin/Documents/programming/uvcdat/builds/d124bd78293d726bbf3d0c91779dfbff0f049ccf/build/VTK/Rendering/OpenGL/vtkOpenGLPolyDataMapper2D.cxx, line 442
vtkOpenGLPolyDataMapper2D (0x7fbbe464a370): failed after RenderOverlay 1 OpenGL errors detected
  0 : (1286) Invalid framebuffer operation

[rexissimus]

This should be fixed on the use-pixmaps-when-dragging branch.

[rexissimus]

It seems like you cannot generate plots dynamically in DAT, because they are subworkflows. Do we need to generate a subworkflow for each plot type in vcs?

[remram44]

There is already a way in _variable_operations to specify an operation either with a callback (building the new variable from Python code, through the dat.vistrails_interface:Variable API) or a subworkflow file (there are examples of both in the VTK package). It should be easy to provide both ways for plots as well (though Variable is not the right object there, but some refactoring of vistrails_interface is needed anyway (#15)).

[remram44]

Interestingly VCS doesn't work with use-pixmaps-when-dragging, because it doesn't support saveToPNG(None) done by QVTKWidget#grabWindowPixmap(). I filed this against UV-CDAT already (CDAT/cdat#1276), I'll look into fixing it.

[remram44]

I started a list of requirements on the wiki.