ParaView reader

Development
1

Hi,

I want to write my first plugin in ParaView to read files of NeXus format (1.2. NeXus Design — nexus v2020.10 documentation). NeXus is a file format that sits on top of HDF5. I think in the first instance my data chunks are likely to be simple 2D grid data sets from the detector. The data sets will be very large (requiring parallel file read and time series capability in the future). I have looked around for examples on how to develop this as a Plugin but unable to find lots of documentation on how this can be done.

I have so far been able to build Paraview from source (works in parallel for some test data sets from ParaView tutorial). I had a look at the MyPNGReader in the Examples directory and was hoping to use this as the starting point to get the plumbing work done.

Should I be basing it on something else instead?

My questions are

  1. Is there a way to get around this by using existing readers (for example XDMF2 reader - unable to load my file as this as not recognized by any of the reader I can find in Paraview)
  2. Should i be using vtkImage as the base class or vtkMultiBlock? Can someone please point me to relevant examples in the source directory than I can take a look?

Thank you for your help.

2

You should base your plugin architecture on MyPNGReader, but not your vtk class.

Is there a way to get around this by using existing readers (for example XDMF2 reader - unable to load my file as this as not recognized by any of the reader I can find in Paraview)

No but you should be able to inspire yourself from HDF5 based reader in VTK

Should i be using vtkImage as the base class or vtkMultiBlock? Can someone please point me to relevant examples in the source directory than I can take a look?

Thats depends on what your dataset can actually contains, see this:
https://docs.paraview.org/en/latest/UsersGuide/understandingData.html