SMTK 22.02 Release Notes

See also SMTK 21.12 Release Notes for previous changes.

SMTK Attribute Resource Changes

Added API to Disable Category Inheritance for Definitions

Added the ability to turn off inheriting category information from the Base Definition. The mechanism to control this is identical to that used at the Item Definition level via the method setIsOkToInherit. This information is persistent and stored in both XML and JSON formats.

Developer changes

New API:

  • bool isOkToInherit() const;

  • void setIsOkToInherit(bool isOkToInheritValue);

Attribute itemAtPath() extended for groups

The attribute resource’s method itemAtPath() has been extended to recognize N as a path component representing sub-group number, where N is the index of the sub-group. Python operation tracing will generate paths using this notation. Sub-group items whose names are integers must be preceded by the sub-group index to be retrieved correctly.

SMTK QT Changes

Base attribute view

An unused method, qtBaseAttributeView::requestModelEntityAssociation(), has been removed.

Qt attribute class

Allow a qtAttribute’s association item-widget to be customized. Currently, this is accomplished by assigning the <AssociationsDef> tag a Name attribute and referring to it in the attribute’s <ItemViews> section. This may change in the future to eliminate any possible naming conflict with other item names.

Qt attribute item-information

The qtAttributeItemInfo class now accepts shared pointers by const-reference rather than by reference so that automatic dynamic-pointer-casts to superclass-pointers will work.

New reference-tree item widget

Add a new qtReferenceTree widget that subclasses qtItem. Combined with the change to qtAttribute described above, this widget provides an alternative to qtReferenceItem for attribute association; it takes more screen space but provides better visual feedback.

Removal of qtActiveObjects

The qtActiveObjects class is no longer in use anywhere and has been removed. If you used it in a third-party extension, you’ll need to create a new object to hold an smtk::view::Selection::Ptr and an active smtk::model::Model.

SMTK ParaView Extensions Changes

ParaView and Qt operation panels and views

The SMTK operation panel is now a “legacy” panel. It is not deprecated, but it is not preferred. Instead, consider using the operation toolbox and parameter-editor panels. By having two panels that split functionality from the previous one, users with small displays do not have to share limited vertical space among the operation list and operation parameters. There are other improvements below.

SMTK provides two new operation panels: + An “operation tool box” panel that shows a list of

operation push-buttons in a grid layout (as opposed to the previous flat text list).

  • An “operation parameter editor” panel than contains a tabbed set of operations. By using tabs, multiple operations can be edited simultaneously.

Because most applications will want to choose between either the legacy panel or the new panels, there are now separate plugins:

  • The smtkPQLegacyOperationsPlugin exposes the legacy operations panel in applications.

  • The smtkPQOperationsPanelPlugin exposes the toolbox and parameter-editor operations panels in applications.

Your application can include or omit any combination of these plugins as needed.

See the SMTK user’s guide for more information about the panels.

Fixed Crash when loading in multiple attribute resources

Closing a CMB application that has more than one attribute resource loaded would cause the application to crash (even if all but one of the attribute resources were closed manually). This commit fixes the problem by checking to make sure the attribute panel has not been deleted when observing changes.

Added the ability to set the View and Attribute Resource

Both displayResource and displayResourceOnServer methods now take in optional view and advancedLevel parameters. If the view is set, then it will be used to display the resource and the advance level in the UI Manager is set to advancedLevel, else the resource’s top level view will be used and the advacedLevel is ignored.

3-D widgets

The pqSMTKPlaneItemWidget has been updated to use ParaView’s new display-sized plane widget. The advantage of this widget is that it does not require an input dataset with non-empty geometric bounds in order to display properly (i.e., the plane can be thought of as independent construction geometry rather than attached to any particular component).

A new pqSMTKFrameItemWidget is available for accepting orthonormal, right-handed coordinate frames from users. It requires 4 double-valued items, each holding a 3-vector: an origin, an x-axis, a y-axis, and a z-axis.

A new pqSMTKSliceItemWidget is available for displaying crinkle-slices of data. This widget uses the new ParaView plane widget and adds ParaView filters to render crinkle- slices of a user-controlled subset of components. This widget uses the new qtReferenceTree along with a modified MembershipBadge (both described below).

A new pqSlicePropertyWidget class is used by the slice-item widget above.

All of the existing 3-d widgets have been moved out of the plugin subdirectory and their symbols are now exported. This change was made so the slice-widget could reference methods on the plane-widget.

A new smtkMeshInspectorView class has been added; it is a custom attribute view for the mesh-inspector operation described below.

SMTK VTK Extension Changes

Mesh inspection operation

Add a MeshInspector “operation” for inspecting meshes to SMTK’s VTK extensions. The operation does nothing; its parameters will have custom widgets that add mesh inspection to the operation panel. It can be applied to any component with geometry.

SMTK StringUtils Changes

Added toBoolean to StringUtils

The new method will convert a string to a boolean. If the method was successful it will return true else it will return false. All surround white-space is ignored and case is ignored.

Current valid values for true are: t, true, yes, 1 Current valid values for false are: f, false, no, 0

SMTK Graph Session Changes

Graph Arcs/OrderedArcs use WeakReferenceWrapper

The type used for storing arc ToTypes has been changed from a std::reference_wrapper<ToType> to a new type smtk::common::WeakReferenceWrapper<ToType> in order to communicate to the arc that the node component of the edge has been removed. This allows nodes to be removed and edges to update lazily.

Developer changes

Plugins using SMTK graph infrastructure will need to rebuild and fix type errors to match the new implementationn in SMTK. They will also need to make sure they are checking if to nodes in an arc are valid using the smtk::common::WeakReferenceWrapper<ToType>::expired() API to dectect if the node is expired or not before accessing it.

Previously, if a node was removed, access via a to node in an arc would silently fail or sefault. Now, invalid access will result in a std::bad_weak_ptr exception when attempting to access the expired data.

GraphTraits allows customized NodeContainer

Allow implementor to override the default container used for storing node data.

NodeContainer API

Developers may now implement custom node storage as an option in GraphTraits.

Implementations of NodeContainer must implement a minimal API to access and modify the underlying node storage. Additional public APIs will be inherited by the smtk::graph::Resource.

class MinimalNodeContainer
{
public:
  // Implement APIs inherited from smtk::resource::Resource.

  /** Call a visitor function on each node in the graph.
   */
  void visit(std::function<void(smtk::resource::ComponentPtr>>& visitor) const;

  /** Find the node with a given uuid, if it is not found return a nullptr.
   */
  smtk::resource::ComponentPtr find(const smtk::common::UUID& uuid) const;

protected:
  // Implement protected APIs required by smtk::graph::Resouce and smtk::graph::Component.

  /** Erase all of the nodes from the \a node storage without updating the arcs.
   *
   * This is an internal method used for temporary removal, modification, and
   * re-insertion in cases where \a node data that is indexed must be changed.
   * In that case, arcs must not be modified.
   *
   * Returns the number of nodes removed. Usually this is either 0 or 1, however the
   * implementation may define removal of > 1 node but this may cause unintended behavior.
   */
  std::size_t eraseNodes(const smtk::graph::ComponentPtr& node);

  /** Unconditionally insert the given \a node into the container.
   *
   * Do not check against NodeTypes to see whether the node type is
   * allowed; this has already been done.
   *
   * Returns whether or not the insertion was successful.
   */
  bool insertNode(const smtk::graph::ComponentPtr& node);
};

Developer changes

The Graph API no longer accepts storing nodes that are not derived from smtk::graph::Component. This is enforced by the APIs required from the NodeContainer.

Using the smtk::graph::ResourceBase::nodes() API is no longer available unless the NodeContainer implements it.

The default NodeContainer, smtk::graph::NodeSet, provides an API for nodes and is implemented using std::set<smtk::resource::ComponentPtr, CompareComponentID> as the underlying container. This is consistent with the previous implementation and will be automatically selected if no NodeContainer is specified in GraphTraits.

Note, a smtk::resource::ComponentPtr is used in the underlying storage to prevent having to cast pointers for APIs inherited from smtk::resource::Resource.

SMTK I/O Changes

Logger severity rename

The smtk::io::Logger severity levels have been renamed:

  • DEBUG is now Debug

  • INFO is now Info

  • WARNING is now Warning

  • ERROR is now Error

  • FATAL is now Fatal

The existing names have been deprecated.

Adding Property Support in Attribute XML Files

You can now set Properties on the Attribute Resource and on an Attribute via an XML file.

Property Section for the Attribute Resource

This is an optional section describing a set of properties that should be added to the Attribute Resource. The Property section is defined by a XML Properties node which is composed of a set of children Property nodes as shown below:

<Properties>
  <Property Name="pi" Type="Int"> 42 </Property>
  <Property Name="pd" Type="double"> 3.141 </Property>
  <Property Name="ps" Type="STRING">Test string</Property>
  <Property Name="pb" Type="bool"> YES </Property>
</Properties>

You can also look at data/attribute/attribute_collection/propertiesExample.rst and smtk/attribute/testing/cxx/unitXmlReaderProperties.cxx for a sample XML file and test.

The following table shows the XML Attributes that can be included in <Property> Element.

XML Attributes for <Property> Element

XML Attribute

Description

Name

String value representing the name of the property to be set.

Type

String value representing the type of the property to be set. Note that the value is case insensitive.

The values that the Type attribute can be set to are:

  • int for an integer property

  • double for a double property

  • string for a string property

  • bool for a boolean property

The node’s value is the value of the property being set.

Supported Values for Boolean Properties

The following are supported values for true:

  • t

  • true

  • yes

  • 1

The following are supported values for false:

  • f

  • false

  • no

  • 0

Note that boolean values are case insensitive and any surrounding white-space will be ignored.

Properties and Include Files

If you include a Attribute XML file that also assigns Resource Properties, the include file’s Properties are assigned first. Meaning that the file suing the include file can override the Properties set by the include file.

Note - the ability to unset a Property is currently not supported.

Note - Properties are currently not saved if you write out an Attribute Resource that contains properties in XML format.

SMTK View Changes

Eliminating the need to call repopulateRoot

Previously, handling new persistent objects forced the Component Phrase Model to call repopulateRoot which can be very expensive for large models. The new approach identifies those Resource Components that would be part of the Phrase Model’s root subphrases and properly inserts them in sorted order, eliminating the repopulateRoot() call.

Resource lock badge

There is now a “lock” badge that indicates when an SMTK resource is locked by an operation. No visual distinction is made between read or write locking. You may use this badge in any view that displays resource phrases.

Membership badge

The membership badge has been extended to be pickier; it is now possible to specify whether the badge should apply to objects, resources, or components; whether they must have geometry or not; and whether components match a query-filter.

The purpose of these configuration options is to accommodate operations that wish to pass geometry for several components to be processed.

Other Changes

Plugin initialization based on ParaView version

Allow SMTK to create plugins for older versions of ParaView (e.g. v5.9) that rely on Qt interfaces to invoke initialziation. These changes should not require any changes to existing plugins using the smtk_add_plugin interface. SMTK plugins that manually implement ParaView plugins via the paraview_add_plugin CMake API should switch to using the SMTK wrapper for creating SMTK plugins.

Generated Plugin Source:

  • Generated sources for older versions or ParaView use an Autostart plugin

and are named using the scheme pq@PluginName@AutoStart.{h,cxx}. This will include the Qt interfaces required for the ParavView Autostart plugin.

  • Generated sources for newer versions of ParaView use an initializer

function, similar to VTK, and are named using the scheme smtkPluginInitializer@PluginName@.{h,cxx}. This includes a function that is namespace’d smtk::plugin::init::@PluginName@ which is called by ParaView.