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Installing ParaVew and the CFSReader Plugin

In order to read openCFS native HDF5 data format (*.cfs files) with paraview you need our CFSReader plugin.

ParaView

You can build ParaView from source or install an official ParaView release for your operation system.

CFSReader Plugin

The CFSReader plugin must be built for a matching ParaView version. Look into our ParaView repository for details.#

We provide the following pre-built plugins:

  • CFSReader v20.03 for ParaView 5.9.0 on Linux
  • for older versions see the legacy docs

The plugin consits of several shared libraries which must be placed such that ParaView can find them. Just extract the archive into the directory of your ParaView installation:, e.g. on Linux

tar -xzvf CFSReader-v21.03_Linux_ParaView-v5.9.0.tar.gz -C <install-dir>

The plugin should end up in lib/paraview-5.9/plugins/CFSReader, from where ParaView should automatically load it (restart required).

In order verify if the plugin was loaded in ParaView open ParaView's Plungin Manager from Tools -> Manage Plugins ... and look for the CFSReader plugin. To manually load it choose load new and select the plugin file (e.g. on linux CFSReader.so).