Adding support for xi:include

Development
1

The ParaView ServerManager configuration XML have grown to be quite complex over the years. To avoid duplication we came up with some idiosyncratic strategies in the past like base_xmlgroup, base_xmlname etc. I am wondering if it’s time to add something more standard-esque like xi::inlcude.

In my use-case, I am adding support for bunch of writers to choose arrays to write. Currently, I’ll have to resort to copy-paste, however with xi:include, it could be potentially supported as follows:

<ServerManagerConfiguration>
  <Stub name="ArraySelectionForWriters">
    <!-- define a stub to re-use -->
     <SubProxy>
        <Proxy name="PassArrays" proxygroup="internal_writers" proxyname="PassArrays" />
        <ExposedProperties>
          <Property name="ChooseArraysToWrite"/>
          <PropertyGroup label="Array Selection" panel_widget="ArrayStatus">
            <Property name="PointDataArrays" />
            <Property name="CellDataArrays" />
            <Property name="FieldDataArrays" />
            <Property name="VertexDataArrays" />
            <Property name="EdgeDataArrays" />
            <Property name="RowDataArrays" />
          </PropertyGroup>
        </ExposedProperties>
        <LinkProperties>
          <Property name="Input" with_property="Input" />
        </LinkProperties>
     </SubProxy>
  </Stub>

  ....
  <WriterProxy  ...>
    <StringVectorProperty name="FileName" .. >
     </StringVectorProperty>
       ...
      <!-- this is same as having the Stub/SubProxy element copied here -->
      <xi::include xpointer="element(//Stub[@name='ArraySelectionForWriters']/SubProxy)" />
  </WriterProxy>

</ServerManagerConfiguation>

Thoughts? Other suggestions?

1 Like
2

+1, but we would need to take a pass into the existing xml in order to use the stub feature when possible.

3

yes indeed. If we do adopt this, we may also want to get rid of the base_xmlgroup, base_xmlname mechanisms as they are confusing to say the least.

1 Like
4

unless we find a very smart way to be retro compatible, this will break lots of plugin and paraview based code.

5

I’m sure we can put together a simple Python-based XML conversion tool.

1 Like