[Chimera-users] Chimera daily-builds: session support for Animate extension

[Darren Weber]

Hi,

There is a recent addition to daily-builds to create a scene called 
'session'.  It can be seen in the Utilities > Animation dialog.  The 
purpose of this scene is to enable easy, quick return to the saved 
session state after making a few changes, without reloading the session 
again.

There are two potential problems with this new addition:
1.  Some of the saved session data or properties may not be supported by 
the scene facility, yet.  Elaine recently sent me an example session 
that is not yet supported by the scene facility; it contains a 
'selection set' that raises an exception in the scene code.  Similar 
problems may arise with other data models or properties.
2.  Assuming everything in a session is supported by the scene facility, 
the 'session' scene should work.  That is, it will work only while all 
the data that it refers to (e.g., models) are present.  If changes 
result in removing any model data that is within the 'session' scene, 
the scene will contain 'orphaned' references and it will work only on 
the remaining model data (if any).  When data is removed (closed), the 
scene facility will issue a prompt (warning) about how it will impact 
the functionality of the scene(s).

This new feature to save/restore sessions is experimental in the 
daily-builds.  For anyone using a daily-build for any mission-critical 
work, it may be handy to have a work around for the above problems.  Try 
making the following changes to 
$CHIMERA_INSTALL_PATH/share/Animate/Session.py:
1.  Comment out line 51 ("Animate.scenes.append('session')") and type 
'pass' beneath it (using the same tabbed indentation).  This will only 
disable the creation of a 'session' scene after restoring any session.  
All other session support remains enabled for scenes.
2.  To completely disable all session support in the Animate extension, 
comment out all the statements that start with 
"chimera.triggers.addHandler".
3.  If you have no need for anything in the Animate extension, 
completely remove it by deleting all of the content in 
$CHIMERA_INSTALL_PATH/share/Animate

-- Darren

-- 

Darren L. Weber, Ph.D.
Programmer/Analyst on Chimera Development Team
Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco
Mission Bay Campus (MC 2240), Genentech Hall (Room N453)
600 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94158-2517
dweber[at]cgl.ucsf.edu, (415) 488-5439 (google voice)
http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/