SMTK 21.11 Release Notes

See also SMTK 21.10 Release Notes for previous changes.

SMTK Attribute Resource Changes

Display hint for attribute resources

The attribute read operation and XML import operations now mark old resources (version 4 or older) with a property, smtk.attribute_panel.display_hint, upon load. Newer files (version 5 or newer) must explicitly contain this hint. The ParaView attribute panel uses (and other UI elements may use) this property determine whether a loaded attribute should be immediately displayed in the panel upon being added to a resource manager.

Furthermore, when the attribute panel displays a resource, it removes the property from any prior resource and adds it to the new resource to be displayed. Thus saving a project with several resources will resume upon reload with the same attribute resource displayed in the editor.

This change to SMTK also removes the default behavior that displays attribute resources when the ParaView pipeline browser’s selection changes. This change was made because the pipeline-browser’s selection changes when (a) a user or python script modifies the active pipeline source or (b) a new pipeline source is created. The second case was causing many updates to the attribute panel when projects with many resources are loaded/created. Now, this behavior is only enabled in “ParaView mode” (i.e., when post-processing is enabled). To reduce the impact of this change, we have also added a (default) option to pqSMTKPipelineSelectionBehavior that will display attribute resources as they are selected (specifically: when the SMTK selection holds a single entry in its primary selection and that entry is an attribute resource marked as displayable).

Finally, this change corrects the sense of smtk::attribute::Resource::isPrivate(), which was previously reversed.

Developer changes

File version numbers have increased to prevent breaking changes in behavior. Old files (XML version 4 or JSON version) will always mark this property to preserve existing behavior. New files must enable the hint explicitly.

If you used smtk::attribute::Resource::isPrivate() or smtk::attribute::Resource::setIsPrivate() in your code, you should reverse the sense of values obtained-from/passed-to these methods. It now returns true when a resource is private (i.e., should not be shown) and false when a resource is public.

User-facing changes

New files – depending on how they were created – may not appear immediately in the attribute editor. Also, files saved to the new format will “remember” which one was showing in the attribute editor.

Attribute writer now has exclusions

The smtk::io::AttributeWriter class now accepts definitions to include (pre-existing) and exclude (new functionality). Exclusions are processed after inclusions, so it is possible to include a base Definition and exclude some subset of its children Definitions for more exact pruning of which definitions and instances should be output by the writer.

Changing the default behavior of smtk::attribute::ReferenceItem::appendValue()

The original default behavior was to uniquely append values and to do an “normal” append when explicitly requested. Based on how this method is used and the fact that doing an append unique does incur a performance hit (order N-squared), the new default behavior does a normal append. The developer will now need to explicitly indicate that a unique append is requested.

Python Related Changes

Updated Python bindings

Python bindings for accessing properties of resources and components have been added; the bindings for the task system have been fixed and are now tested.

If you have a python module that defines classes which inherit smtk.operation.Operation, you can register all of these operation classes to an operation manager by calling a new registerModuleOperations method on the manager (passing the module as a parameter).

There is now a python binding for smtk.extension.paraview.appcomponents.pqSMTKBehavior. You may call its instance() method in the ModelBuilder or ParaView python shell and use the returned instance to obtain managers (using the activeWrapperResourceManager, activeWrapperOperationManager, activeWrapperViewManager, and activeWrapperSelection methods).

Operation Tracing

Operations executed in the gui are added to any active python trace. The first operation adds imports and retrieves the managers used to replay an operation. Operation inputs and associations are recorded in an XML string so they are complete. Users should be able to copy-paste or replay the trace in the internal python shell.