Paraview User Settings

ParaView Support
1

I would like to override a number of Paraview defaults using the ParaView-UserSettings.json file. I was able to override some settings but not others. A major difficulty is that I cannot find a list of the names of the various classes. In some cases (OrientationAxesVisibility) I was successful, but in other cases (SkipZeroTime or Skip0Time and AxesGrid) it did not do anything. My effort at a config file is at the end. Some of the settings were created in the paraview GUI.

Thanks

Tony

{
“settings” : {
“RenderViewSettings” : {
“UseFXAA” : 0
}
},
“Properties” : {
“GeneralControls” : {
“SkipZeroTime” : 0,
}
}
“views” : {
“RenderView” : {
“Background” : [ 0.32000000000000001, 0.34000000000000002, 0.4299999999
9999999 ],
“AxesGrid” : 1,
“OrientationAxesVisibility” : 0,
“CameraParallelProjection” : 1,
“StereoType” : 0
}
}
}

2

@cory.quammen Is this a bug or feature hole?

3

Welcome to ParaView, Tony.

The settings files aren’t intended to be user-editable, though of course you can. The only references for property names are various XML files within ParaView, e.g.,

https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/blob/master/ParaViewCore/ServerManager/SMApplication/Resources/readers.xml
https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/blob/master/ParaViewCore/ServerManager/SMApplication/Resources/filters.xml

and so on.

The easiest (and intended) way to customize your settings is through the GUI. You can change properties for sources/readers/filters, displays (representations), views, among others, then usually click on a button with a disk icon to save those settings as defaults.

For example, it looks like you want to customize the OpenFOAM reader. After you load the OpenFOAM file, uncheck the “Skip Zero Time” checkbox and click apply. Next, click on the disk icon to the right of the Properties section of the Properties panel. When you exit ParaView, these settings will be saved to your ParaView-UserSettings.json file.

I hope that helps.

4

Another possible reference is the Python documentation here:

https://kitware.github.io/paraview-docs/latest/python/paraview.servermanager_proxies.html

But, that doesn’t tell you what group the source/reader/filter is. Fortunately, it isn’t too hard. Sources and reader settings need to be defined in a “sources” JSON node and filters are in a “filters” JSON node. Following the OpenFOAM example, your settings file should contain

{
  "sources" : {
    "OpenFOAMReader" : {
      "SkipZeroTime" : 0
    }
  }
}

You can get at least the internal name of the reader and the property name from

https://kitware.github.io/paraview-docs/latest/python/paraview.simple.OpenFOAMReader.html

Note that this isn’t always the case because the names of Python attributes are derived from property labels shown in the UI while the settings .json file uses the property names, and these two things are not always the same for every property.

5

Cory

Thanks for the help. Sorry to bother you with what I now realize was a lame question. I had not realized that only “Applied” settings can be changed, so the save icon was usually greyed out.

Now I can see how to configure everything the way I want - thanks so much.

Tony

6

Glad to help, Tony!