Time series for ParaView

Question

Dear all,

How can I write a time series to file in order to be opened by ParaView?

I used TimeSeriesHDF5 series(MPI_COMM_NULL, "primal"); from the undocumented demo, but ParaView fails to load the file.

The only reader that does not fail miserably is Pixie Files, but I get the following error:

ERROR: In /Users/kitware/Dashboards/MyTests/NightlyMaster/ParaViewSuperbuild-Release-Python27/paraview/src/paraview/Utilities/VisItBridge/databases/AvtAlgorithms/vtkAvtSTSDFileFormatAlgorithm.cxx, line 158
vtkVisItPixieReader (0x7fcee44302b0): VisIt Exception caught.

Any pointers?

Comments

You seem to be asking about TimeSeriesHDF5 specifically, but is there a reason you can't save your time-evolving data as regular VTK (.pvd) files?

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I have a time-dependant problem and I wanted to make a movie, all I have is paraview...

Answer 1

The Cahn-Hilliard demo shows an example of writing multiple timesteps to a VTK (.pvd) file. This will generate separate .vtu files for each timestep, but if you load the .pvd file in Paraview, it will open as a time series. Then you can save a movie normally.

You may need to rename your function before writing for this to work properly.

Answer 2

I do this using the C++ API using dolfin::XDMFFile.

// open file, fileName is a string
dolfin::XDMFFile file(MPI_COMM_WORLD, fileName);

// write for each time step
// dolfinFunction is a dolfin::Function
// time is the floating point value of the time

file.write(dolfinFunction, time);

You should be able to open this file in paraview and it will run as a movie automatically.