# Creating custom Paraview Reader

**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/creating-custom-paraview-reader/5027
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [August 4, 2020, 2:33pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/creating-custom-paraview-reader/5027 "2020-08-04T14:33:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![piv\_its](https://discourse.paraview.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@piv\_its](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/piv_its)
#### Post date: [August 4, 2020, 2:33pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/creating-custom-paraview-reader/5027/1 "2020-08-04T14:33:58Z")

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Hello, I’m trying to create a custom Paraview Reader for netCFD files with 6 dimensions. The dimensions contain informations such as time, x/y - coordinates, velocity components (u,v,w) …

I’m completly new in C++ Programming. Is there any step by step instruction, how to programm a paraview reader? Or which files i have to create?

I only found these two pages which doesn’t helped me unfortunately…

1. [https://vtk.org/Wiki/ParaView/Examples/Plugins/Reader](https://vtk.org/Wiki/ParaView/Examples/Plugins/Reader)
2. [https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Writing\_ParaView\_Readers](https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Writing_ParaView_Readers)

Thanks for any help in advance !

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### Author: ![mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/mwestphal/32/17_2.png) [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [August 4, 2020, 2:36pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/creating-custom-paraview-reader/5027/2 "2020-08-04T14:36:29Z")

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in the ParaView source, Examples/Plugin contains many example, including readers.

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### Author: ![piv\_its](https://discourse.paraview.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@piv\_its](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/piv_its)
#### Post date: [August 4, 2020, 3:29pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/creating-custom-paraview-reader/5027/3 "2020-08-04T15:29:09Z")

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Thank you for the answer.  
I found the Example/ Plugin folder but when I look for example at the “MyPNGReader”, I could only find “CMakeLists.txt”, “paraview.plugin” and “readers.txt”. I coudn’t find the C++ file(s) ?? where actually is defined how the data from the file (in this case .png) is further processed. Somehow I guess, I have to tell Paraview how my data from the netCFD file should be interpreted.

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### Author: ![mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/mwestphal/32/17_2.png) [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2020, 3:38pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/creating-custom-paraview-reader/5027/4 "2020-08-06T15:38:29Z")

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Take a look into the `readers.xml` file. It refers to a `vtkPNGReader` which is present in VTK.

You could use your own vtk class here to read your data. Take a look into ElevationFilters plugin to figure out how to build your own vtk class in a plugin.