VTK XML format and data type specific variants

[utkarshayachit]

@lassoan

A script usually takes input file names from command-line arguments or files. How does it matter what the filename is?

Scripts are often written like so

... blah blah blah..

SaveDataSet(producer, "../foobar.vtk")

Here, SaveDataSet call will have to change based on what the data type is for VTK-XML files.

Let’s say your script accepts png, tif, ply, stl, vtp, and vti file extensions now. Would you like the script to only accept vtx extension? Or the script would take png, tif, ply, stl, and vtx?

I think this a bad comparison. TIFF, PNG, etc. are different file formats entirely. If the user wants to write a file in PNG format, one can easily specify so in the script.

SaveDataSet(producer, "..../filename.png")

Now, if the user wants to write the data in VTK-XML format, this is not sufficient. He has to determine which extension it’s going to be based on the input type and then generate.

We are not talking radomly combining file extensions here. We’re saying for all files in the VTK-XML format, it makes since to have single extension than different ones based on the data type. This split is unique to VTK-XML formats, and my original question was aimed at understanding why that was done. From the discussion, I am concluding there’s really no rhyme or reason for that decision,

@lassoan

Note that this requirement is not related to the discussion above, because even if we merge a few VTK file formats, we still have dozens of other file extensions that we want to read with a single class.

Again, that is not the core point here. It’s simply limited to VTK-XML file formats.