[petsc-dev] DMDA VTK viewer regression: field names missing

[Jed Brown]

Patrick Sanan via petsc-dev <petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> I was going to say something similar to Matt; to me it is worth the 1.5x
> redundancy in the data if I can just view the output file with "doing
> anything special". I have also done something similar to what you're
> describing with save states, and it works fine; weirdly it seems like much
> higher overhead than it is, though.

That overhead for 2D fields isn't a big deal for me, but how would you
identify that three components should be interpreted as vectors?  What
if they are three chemical concentrations?  Plotting as vectors would
just be confusing in that case.

> Here's what I'd propose:  too ugly and convoluted?
> - If the user has set any custom field names for the DMDA, interpret that
> to mean that they want to deal with them individually, so use the old
> behavior (but incorporate Dave's comments on improving the field names)
> - Otherwise, assume that the user wants the new (current) behavior
> - Document this stuff as much as possible to try to avoid confusion

I think this sounds good.