Automate production of diagram PDFs for all regimes in a given hydraulic scheme

[ahobeost]

As a user, I would like to automate the workflow of producing images of the different hydraulic regimes in a given diagram. This tends to work as follows:

FOREACH regime:

• adjust the pumps and valves
• run the massFlowSolver
• wait till the visualizer pops up
• go to the 2nd hour to see the flows
• export the PDF
• copy the Mfr and T files for later investigation

Afterwards, the PDFs also still need to be cropped.

I would like a way to:

• [x] provide a table/file/list of regimes with corresponding pump/valve values
• [x] render the diagram from a python script (without the window popping up) onto a PDF
• [x] adjust the pump and valve values according to the regimes from python
• [ ] crop the canvas before rendering (GUI button for this would be nice as well)

The other requirements should already be accessible from python

[ahobeost]

@zuckerruebe: The following package makes the visual comparison of PDFs very simple. https://pypi.org/project/diff-pdf-visually/#on-windows-native

However, it requires both ImageMagic and PopplerCairo to be installed correctly. Before I further with this, I'd like your opinion on these requirements

[ahobeost]

Here is one alternative, which uses a CLI: https://github.com/vslavik/diff-pdf

[ahobeost]

Matplotlib provides a cleaner option: https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/testing_api.html#module-matplotlib.testing.compare

At the moment, this works with pdfs. However, it would be nice to run these tests without always saving the pdf to disk.

The following may allow this when combined with pytest_mpl: https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/backends.html

https://pytest-mpl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html

[ahobeost]

Ok, so matplotlib only requires inkscape to do the svg comparison: https://matplotlib.org/stable/devel/dependencies.html#test-dependencies