[MOAB-dev] Sets that won't be written on save

[Jason Kraftcheck]

Jed Brown wrote:
> I can create tags that won't be written by naming them with double
> underscore.  Would it be difficult to be able to something similar with
> sets?  I have sets that are specific to the domain decomposition in use,
> they don't make sense in a file.  I need to write the mesh at least any
> time the topology changes (and currently any time the mesh moves).  I
> know of two solutions, one is to have a set (other than the root set)
> which contains everything that should be written, but this seems awkward
> because it's not the default.  An alternative is to keep a set of sets
> that should not be written and create it's complement in the root set,
> before writing to a file.  I think this is not very expensive given the
> way sets are stored.  Is there a better way?  When writing only a
> subset, should entities be directly in the set or just recursively so?
> 

There is no mechanism in MOAB to specify entities that are not to be 
written (sets or elements or whatever).  You'd need to specify the 
compliment (entities to be written.) as you mention above.  It probably 
wouldn't be very difficult to add another bit flag to the set properties 
(e.g. MESHSET_TEMPORARY) and update the writers such that they honor it. 
  A nice implementation would be a little more complex:  we should 
probably group temporary sets in the same sequence(s).

When writing a subset of the mesh to a file, all entities and sets 
recursively contained in the specified set will be written.

- jason