Command line argument parsing

Development
21

Here’s an MR that adds CLI11 to VTK: https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/pipelines/228604

1 Like
22

Here a work-in-progress MR: https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/merge_requests/4951

Currently, the design is as such:

  • ParaView components (and ParaView-based applications) can depend on arbitrary run-time configuration options. These options are to be treated as set-once-never-modified in the lifetime of the process and setup during process startup. The code can use these options to control runtime behavior.
    For example, vtkRemotingCoreConfiguration class provides options that affect how process module and other core Paraview remoting components are initialized. vtkRemotingServerManagerConfiguration class provides options that affect ServerManager operation / initialization etc. One can concieve similar configuration classes for the each of the executables to support additional configuration options.

  • All these configuration classes are singletons.

  • vtkCLIOptions is a class that wraps CLI::App and it intended to handle building and processing on command line arguments. Each of the configuration classes provides a PopulateOptions method that takes a vtkCLIOptions instance that it then populates with command line arguments for each of the available option.
    A typical executable, has the following code to parse args:

vtkNew<vtkCLIOptions> options;
options->SetName("TestRemotingCoreConfiguration");
options->SetDescription("Test for 'vtkRemotingCoreConfiguration'");

/**
* We can provides a `paraview::PopulateOptions(...)`,
* `pvbatch::PopulateOptions(..)` etc. as convenience methods to populate all supported
* options for each standard executable in ParaView.
*/
vtkRemotingCoreConfiguration::GetInstance()->PopulateOptions(options);
vtkRemotingServerManagerConfiguration::GetInstance()->PopulateOptions(options);
...

/**
* For ParaView-based applications, they can do
* the following to add new options
*/
MyCustomConfiguration::GetInstance()->PopulateOptions(options);

if (options->Parse(argc, argv))
{
    // parsing successful.
}
  • For backwards compatibility, the vtkPVOptions instance will be initialized using values in each of the *Configuration classes and thus old code depending on vtkPVOptions will continue to work.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

1 Like
23

Just an update, these changes are now in master. ParaView-based custom applications will be impacted by this change. So please feel free to raise any questions on the forum that you may have regarding the necessary changes.