Building the QDF Format Plugin

In order to enable VisIt to read and interpret out QDF files. we had to implement a plugin for this.

The plugin code must be compiled with the tools VisIt was compiled with.

Environment Variables

The build script for the plugin Build_PLUGIN.sh expects the environment variables XML2CMAKE_BIN and CMAKE_VISIT to be set to the corresponding binaries. The best way is to export these variables in a script that will be executed whenever a shell starts, in bash that would be ~/.bashrc.

In this file add the lines

export XML2CMAKE_BIN=/opt/visit_3.3.2/bin/xml2cmake
export CMAKE_VISIT=/opt/visit_3.3_sources/cmake-3.18.2/bin/cmake

and then type

. ~/bash_rc

to activate the changes for the current terminal. Any terminal opened after that will already have these environment variables set correctly.

Compiling the Plugin

In the QHG code tree, go to the qdf format plugin directory and run the script BUILD_PLUGIN.sh:

cd ${QHG4_DIR}/visit_plugins/qdfformat/

./BUILD_PLUGIN.sh

Once the compiling of the plugin is finished, you can open QDF files in VisIt and display various plots (open a file, then add the pseudocolor plot you want to display).