The missing Apply button press "trap"

Development
1

As an experienced user of ParaView, I press Apply in order to load a data file after choosing the proper reader - automatically. However, I had once more a support case with a less experienced customer - like I had it already several times before: You have some geometric object visible on the screen that was loaded from a file, but no way to attach any “filter” to it, like Transform or Clip or any other!

And only after some struggling also from my side I realized: The customer had not pressed the Apply button, but only the “eye” in the pipeline brower. With that it is possible to trigger loading the file as well and view the geometric object, only that it somehow is not “completed” yet - internally.

Since I do not know how all this is working internally, I cannot propose a proper solution. But somehow I assume that there must be one, and I could imagine many from a user’s point of view:

  • Disable the “eye” as long as Apply was not pressed. Not really “friendly”, but at least a way to enforce pressing that button
  • Or else, automatically trigger the Apply actions if the user presses the “eye”
  • Or issue some message if the user presses the “eye” for an “unfinished” object
  • Or whatever…
3 Likes
2

All good suggestions.

https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/issues/19476

3

As a relatively new user to paraview I’ve been caught out by this many times already where I couldn’t figure out how to apply a filter to some data I had loaded and set data variables for display already. Then accidentally clicking apply suddenly allowed access to the filters.

I’ve now mostly defaulted to hitting apply first but still occasionally forget and switch on data with the eye first. A little red exclamation beside the eye would help remind users filters are not yet available if the apply button has not been pressed.

Good that there is at least an issue tracking this!

1 Like