PVD files and vtkhdf support

ParaView Support
1

So I’ve slowly been putting together a workflow to use ParaView for visualising my simulation results and one of the final steps is to create an index file for easy opening of multiple meshes, however I’m having difficulty with making this work for vtkhdf files.

I’ve tried this simple .pvd file but this crashes ParaView as soon as I click apply:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<VTKFile type="Collection" version="1.0" byte_order="LittleEndian" header_type="UInt64">
 <Collection>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="0" name="Instant" part="0" file="\Inst\ts_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="1" name="Temporal" part="0" file="\Temporal\all_t0.8_t1.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" name="Mesh A" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom1\t_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" name="Mesh B" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom2\ts_t_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" name="Mesh C" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom3\t_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" name="Mesh D" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom4\t_0.vtkhdf"/>
 </Collection>
</VTKFile>

I though it might be the name so I removed that but it still crashes immediately.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<VTKFile type="Collection" version="1.0" byte_order="LittleEndian" header_type="UInt64">
 <Collection>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="0" part="0" file="\Inst\ts_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="1" part="0" file="\Temporal\all_t0.8_t1.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom1\t_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom2\ts_t_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom3\t_0.vtkhdf"/>
   <DataSet timestep="0" group="2" part="0" file="\Meshes\geom4\t_0.vtkhdf"/>
 </Collection>
</VTKFile>

In both cases there is no error or warning messages so not quite sure how to debug the problem further.

Could this mean that vtkhdf files cannot be used within a pvd file (would be a strange restriction since it’s just a list of files to open) or have I just made a silly mistake?

2

Hi @jpmorr

PVD format is, in essence, a VTKXML format extension, not a generic containers.
In a way, it is similar to VTM format.
It is not compatible with VTKHDF (or with any other non-VTKXML format) and never will be.

VTKHDF define its own way to storing composite data, as specified in the format, so you may want to use that.

this crashes ParaView as soon as I click apply:

ParaView should not crash though but it should error out, this is an issue to fix in the PVD reader