Importing a model into an existing resource

Simulation Modeling Toolkit (SMTK) Using SMTK
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@chart3388 In response to the issue you were having with importing a model into an existing resource, this MR contains updates to the rendering code that should hopefully fix 1/2 of your problem. The resource panel will still not update to show the newly added model (a fix for this is still WIP), but the second model should now render 100% of the time.

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FWIW, the MR also contains updates to the mesh session to exercise the ability to load a model into an existing resource.

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@tj.corona - So far my testing shows this did fix 1/2 of the problem of rendering 100% of the time. I will push out to a few others to validate as well. Thank you

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@tj.corona - Any update on the other 1/2 of this fix?

Thanks

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No update, but the issue definitely hasn’t fallen off of our radar!

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@chart3388 I believe the second half of the issue is now resolved. However, I think there is a third “half” to this issue: currently, when an import operation does not result in the creation of a new resource, ParaView’s File→Open semantics mean that 2 ParaView representations will be created for the same resource. That results in every model entity in the resource being rendered twice and causes problems with visibility controls:

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On Monday, @tj.corona and I discussed the problem we were seeing with Utkarsh, but for ParaView our use case does not make much sense (reading in ParaView is a 2-step process since many readers allow data subsets to be chosen before the actual read occurs when you click Apply).

There seem to be a few solutions but no clear winner:

  1. Copy significant portions of ParaView’s File→Open QAction into a new method that can properly handle SMTK imports. Then replace File→Open with our new QAction. This would add a large maintenance burden to ModelBuilder and it is unclear how well this would work in “ParaView+plugins” mode (i.e., using SMTK within ParaView rather than running the ModelBuilder application).
  2. Make “Import” separate from “Open”; they will have different menu items. This will require users to understand the difference between the two.
  3. Make Import and Open behave differently in ParaView vs. ModelBuilder. The idea would be to provide (i) a ParaView-only plugin that always imports data into a new resource rather than existing resources by registering ImportGroup operations with File→Open and (ii) a ModelBuilder-only plugin that imports data into existing resources whenever possible by registering ImportGroup operations to this new QAction.
  4. Use the existing File→Open framework as-is, but follow up with another signal/slot – generated when importing into an existing resource – that deletes one of the pipeline sources.

We should discuss the best way to resolve the situation next week.