Write data with date and time in the name so Paraview recognizes as TimeSeries

Question

I've been trying to do the following:

• Write some data named like this:

foo01_01_2013_00_00_00.vtk

foo01_01_2013_06_00_00.vtk

foo01_01_2013_12_00_00.vtk

foo01_01_2013_18_00_00.vtk

foo02_01_2013_00_00_00.vtk

foo02_01_2013_06_00_00.vtk

foo02_01_2013_12_00_00.vtk

foo02_01_2013_18_00_00.vtk

Template: foo[day] _ [month] _ [year] _ [hour] _ [minute] _ [second]

In a way that paraview recognizes as file series. But I can't get it done.

Can someone help me?

The wiki says the following:

ParaView recognizes file series named using certain patterns including:

fooN.vtk
foo_N.vtk
foo-N.vtk
foo.N.vtk
Nfoo.vtk
N.foo.vtk
foo.vtk.N
foo.vtk-sN 

Where N is an integer (with any number of leading zeros). To load a file series, first make sure that the file names match one of the patterns described above. Next, navigate to the directory where the file series is.

Answer 1

ParaView is not sophisticated enough in recognizing file sequences to identify time/date stamps in this way. It is only capable of identifying a group of files with the same name except an integer index.

I think the easiest way to solve your problem would be to define the time as "[time units] since [date/time]" that resolves to integers. For example, it looks like all your time stamps happen on the hour, so you could make an index that is "hours since January 1, 2013, 00:00:00" and your file sequence would be the following:

foo_0000.vtk
foo_0006.vtk
foo_0012.vtk
foo_0018.vtk
foo_0024.vtk
foo_0030.vtk
foo_0036.vtk
foo_0042.vtk

Even though the numbers are not consecutive, ParaView should still recognize them as a group and load them in the appropriate order. However, note that the legacy VTK reader will not recognize the time value encoded in the filename. Instead, the time steps will just be indexed as 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. If you need ParaView to recognize the actual time of the recordings, you will have to use a file format that stores this information. For example, if you store your data in a netCDF file following the CF convention, you can give your data a time dimension, declare the time in whatever units you like, and ParaView will recognize that.