EnSight supports user-written extensions written in
Python. See the Produce Customized Access to Tools & Features section for details on this
process. Once the user has developed an extension, they need to place it in
a location where EnSight can find it. For user-specific extensions, one can
place them in a subdirectory of the user's private preferences directory
named extensions/user_defined. For example, if the
private preferences directory is
~someuser/.ensight251
(under Linux), create a directory named
~someuser/.ensight251/extensions/user_defined
and place the Python extension files in that
directory (the files should use the CTOR comment
header convention outlined in the Ansys EnSight How-To Manual.
For enterprise/multi-user extension installations, users should use the Product Extension mechanism. To simplify the distribution and installation of extensions and full graphical user interface replacements, the product extension was introduced. Product extensions are located in subdirectories of $CEI and the EnSight core scans for them right after loading the extensions located in the $CEI/ensight251/site_preferences/extensions/user_defined tree. EnSight looks for XML files named product.xml in the subdirectories of $CEI. An example from EnSight 9.1 is EnSight CFD, which is defined through the file $CEI/ensight91cfd/product.xml. A minimum product.xml would look like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <product> <ensight_extension> <loader>EnSightCFDGUI.py</loader> <requires> <ensight_core> <minimum>9.1.0.0</minimum> <maximum>9.2.0.-1</maximum> </ensight_core> </requires> </ensight_extension> <ensight_extension> <loader>another_extension.py</loader> <translation>path/*.qm</translation> <documentation langid="">path/docs</documentation> <documentation langid="is">path/docs/iceland</documentation> <requires> <ensight_core> <minimum>9.1.0.0</minimum> <maximum>9.2.0.-1</maximum> </ensight_core> </requires> </ensight_extension> </product>
This file defines two extensions to EnSight
(<ensight_extension>). The location
of the Direct Load bootstrap Python file is specified
by <loader> and must be a subdirectory of the
directory where the product.xml file is located. This
particular extension has a single dependency
(<requires>) on the EnSight core
Python interface
(<ensight_core>). The allowed
versions of the EnSight core are specified by the
<minimum> and
<maximum> tags respectively. In the
example, this extension is allowed to load for all versions of EnSight
number 9.1. Note that numbers are substituted for the
(x) version tags on EnSight (for example,
9.1.0(c) corresponds to
9.1.0.2). All version comparisons are fieldwise
numeric and matching the limits enables the extension. The second extension
includes a pair of Qt .qm translation files that go
along with the extension.
Note: An extension block
(<ensight_extension>)
may have any number of
<loader> and
<translation> tags
and multiple <requires>
blocks that apply to all of the <loader> and
<translation> tags in
the block. Also, the <loader> and
<translation> tags
can include glob wildcards to specify
multiple translation and Python
loader files.
The <documentation> tag allows
the product XML file to specify a directory where EnSight will look for
it's documentation PDF files before it looks for them under
$CEI/ensight*/docs. The tag also supports the
langid="" attribute. This qualifies the
path to a specific language. That path will only be used if EnSight is
currently using the specified language. In the above example, path/docs will
always be considered because the language id is "",
but if the current EnSight language is set to Icelandic
("is"), the
path/docs/iceland will be searched first.
In all cases, the core EnSight docs directories will be searched, having
failed all other matches.