Vtkski development

Documentation for vtkski

On-line documentation for vtkski is available at http://mike.kin.ucalgary.ca/vtkski/html/index.html .

Also, see vtkMeshModel which contains some examples of using the class vtkMeshModel .

Compiling and Installation

Getting the source code

Get the sources from the subversion repository.

svn checkout https://mike.kin.ucalgary.ca/svn/bonelab/trunk/vtkski

See the section on svn for more info: Subversion (SVN)

Compiling

From the vtkski project directory, create a build directory and use cmake to configure the build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake-gui ..

The most important cmake variable is VTK_DIR. If you intend to also build the paraview plugins, then you must build vtkski against the internal version of VTK inside the paraview build directory. (See Paraview development if you need to install ParaView). As an example, on my system I set VTK_DIR to /home/eric/source/paraview-3.6.1/build/VTK. On the other hand, the internal version of VTK that paraview uses is generally not accessible to outisde of Paraview, so this will make your vtkski library unusable outside of Paraview. There are two possible solutions:

• Make two build directories (eg. 'build' and 'build-paraview') and build vtkski twice - once against the internal version of VTK inside Paraview, and once against your installed version of VTK. You then have to manage which one is actually used with the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on OS-X). This solution probably won't work if you want to install the vtkski libraries to a standard library search path.
• Build your installed version of VTK from the VTK directory in the paraview source tree. Something like this:

cd ~/source/paraview
mkdir build-VTK
cd build-VTK
cmake-gui ../VTK
make
sudo make install

(You probably end up with two build directories inside your paraview source tree then, one, probably named just 'build', for paraview, and one 'build-VTK' for building VTK alone.)

Another possible solution would be for me to modify the build so that two libraries, with different names, get created.

Building Doxygen documentation

To build the Doxygen documentation, set the cmake variable BUILD_DOCUMENTATION to ON. This variable is marked as advanced. You will need to have installed Doxygen ( http://www.doxygen.org/ ) in order to build the documentation.

The documentation is not automatically built with make (it takes a very long time to build). Instead, you will need to explicitly request it, like this:

make  vtkskiDoxygenDoc

Installing the Doxygen documentation on mike.kin

I recommend that you build the documentation with the cmake flag DOCUMENTATION_HTML_TARZ set to on (this variable is an advanced setting). Then the build process will automatically make a tar ball of all the HTML documentation, build/Utilities/Doxygen/vtkski-html.tar.gz , which is easy to copy over to mik.kin (using FTP or scp or the mounted Data0 volume).

The documentation needs to live in /Library/WebServer/Documents/vtkski . The commands would look something like this

tar xvzf /from/somewhere/vtkski-html.tar.gz
sudo rm -rf /Library/WebServer/Documents/vtkski     # remove old docs
sudo mv html /Library/WebServer/Documents/vtkski
sudo chown -R root /Library/WebServer/Documents/vtkski

Checklist for new vtkski classes

• Select a category for your new class, for example 'IO', and put your source files in that directory.
• Modify the CmakeLists.txt file in that directory to add your new source files to the list of source files.
• Build vtkski and make sure that your class compiles.
• Refer to Creating VTK Classes for important coding style tips.
• Add your class, with a brief description, to Class List for vtkski.

For help writing VTK classes, refer to the book "VTK User's Guide", Part III, "Developer's Guide". There are a couple of copies in the lab.