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

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 10:56 PM Jed Brown via petsc-dev <
> petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>> Prior to this PR, which was merged for 3.10
>>
>>
>> https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/pull-requests/1029/dmda-vtk-viewing-output-multiple-dof/diff
>>   https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/ea2d7708fa6
>>
>> we could have files that look like the following, and thus were easy to
>> navigate in Paraview and Visit.
>>
>
> Tell me if I am wrong (since I do not run it this way). I think the point
> of Patrick's change is a good one, and
> necessary to view things with DMStag. 

Or maybe just necessary to avoid needing to use multiple files or add
filters.

> What Jed dislikes, rightly, is that some metadata has gone missing.
> Does Xdmf allow you to name the components? The way I do this
> petsc_gen_xdmf.py is to write the whole thing as Patrick does, but
> then create views into the data using the component names. It sound
> like this should be doable here.

Perhaps.  A key reason for using VTK viewers is that they're relatively
quick and foolproof compared to formats that need libraries and/or
auxiliary files.