According tothis Kitware blog post from 2016 one can reload the original input files by right clicking on them and selecting reload file option:
Doing so the user should be given the option to select to reload the same files or change them:
I have made some .pvsm files on a machine and synced them across other machines. the sync folder on different machines has a different path folder and now when opening the .pvsm file it can’t find the input files, even though the relative path hasn’t changed:
ERROR: In C:\bbd\2d618e80\build\superbuild\paraview\src\VTK\Filters\Extraction\vtkExtractSelectedArraysOverTime.cxx, line 116
vtkPExtractSelectedArraysOverTime (0000018E2E06F9C0): No time steps in input data!ERROR: In C:\bbd\2d618e80\build\superbuild\paraview\src\VTK\Common\ExecutionModel\vtkExecutive.cxx, line 784
vtkPVCompositeDataPipeline (0000018E2DC11000): Algorithm vtkPExtractSelectedArraysOverTime(0000018E2E06F9C0) returned failure for request: vtkInformation (0000018E2EA47740)
Debug: Off
Modified Time: 943988
Reference Count: 1
Registered Events: (none)
Request: REQUEST_DATA
FORWARD_DIRECTION: 0
ALGORITHM_AFTER_FORWARD: 1
FROM_OUTPUT_PORT: 0
And when trying to reload files it does not give me the option to reselect them. Either I don’t know how to this or this is a bug. One a side note it could be a good feature that paraview saves both relative and absolute paths, giving the user the option to choose between the two while saving the state.
P.S.1. I was able to open the .psvm file in a text editor and see it is just an XML structure. Found the tag regarding the path to the original file and changing to the current location. However this is a workaround not a solution. It also drops other error messages, which I don’t think to be relevant to this post.
P.S.2. OK. According to this blog post It is indeed possible to indicate the input file path when loading the state files. So in my case I was right clicking on my files right in my File Explorer and opened them with ParaView. But the correct way is to open ParaView first and choose Load state from File menu. then choose the Choose File Name under Load State Data File Options. Also I doubt if the error message I have mentioned in this post has anything to do with the this issue.