[Paraview] one global structure

[Brad King]

Fabian Braennstroem wrote:
> I have a rectilinear mesh for my problem and want to write
> out a lot of time steps in different files. This should be
> no problem to do; I think using 'Collection' I can collect
> them again; like this example I found:
> 
> 
>   <VTKFile type="Collection">
>   <Collection>
>   <DataSet part="0" file="a_field-part0-{timestepnumber}.vtr"/>
>   <DataSet part="1" file="a_field-part1-{timestepnumber}.vtr"/>
>   ...
>   ...
> 
>   </Collection>
>   </VTKFile>
> 
> My problem is now, that I have to write the structure and
> mesh data for every time step in every file which will
> produce a lot of bytes. Is there a way to define the grid
> and structure of all data-files global in one file, so that
> the data-files just have data in binary format inside?

The VTK XML formats were not originally designed with timesteps as a 
design goal.  Time support may be added but it is not yet implemented. 
If you want to do this with ParaView you can look at the HDF5 format, 
which I believe supports single geometry and multiple timesteps of data.

-Brad