Programmable filter parameterization
This issue was created automatically from an original Mantis Issue. Further discussion may take place here.
A major use case for the V&V effort involves automating the use of Python API for a large number (100s to 1000s) of test cases. Each test case consists of a Python script that builds a pipeline using the paraview API, and one-or-more programmable filters in the pipeline that receive their own scripts. The programmable filter scripts often have much in common, except details such as the name of the input array to be processed, etc. Currently, this means either writing multiple programmable scripts, or doing string-concatenation in the pipeline script to "generate" programmable filter scripts. Ideally, we would like to have programmable filter scripts that can be "parameterized", at a minimum by providing some mechanism to provide zero-to-many named-value pairs to the script.
One thought was that the progammable filter could have an additional text property "parameters" is always executed before the main script. Callers could put any valid Python expression in the "parameters" property to initialize variables that would be accessed from the main script. This would be easy to implement, but the caller would still be responsible for "concatenating" multiple parameters into a single string.
Better would be some sort of API that would look like:
programmable_filter.SetProperty("name", "value")