XDM: An eXtensible Data Model
=============================

Overview
--------

A library for reading and writing mesh based scientific datasets. This library
is based on the original Xdmf library, developed by Jerry Clarke and the U.S.
Army Research Lab.

Requirements
------------

- CMake version 2.6.3 or greater.
- If you intend to build the unit tests, you will need an installation of Boost
  version 1.37 or greater.  Note this is *only* for the library unit tests.
  Boost is not required when using the library.
- If you intend to build the optional communication library for MPI enabled
  datasets, then an MPI installation is required. This library has been tested
  with OpenMPI and MPICH.

Installation
------------

Set up a build directory for the library.  Here we assume that the build
directory is a sibling directory of the top xdm source directory.

 $ cd xdm-build
 $ cmake ../xdm
 $ make
 $ make install

Note that depending on your system setup you may need root permissions for the
install step.

Build Options
-------------

There are a few options that control the xdm build.  You can set these options
by passing '-D<variable.=<value>' to the CMake command line or by using the
CMake gui or ccmake to edit the cmake cache from an already existing build
directory.

CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX : (Path) choose a different install path. Default is
                       /usr/local.

BUILD_TESTING        : (True/False) Enable the library unit tests. Default is 
                       True.

XDM_HDF              : (True/False) Build the HDF5 dataset access library.

XDM_COMMUNICATION    : (True/False) Enable the communication library for MPI
                       enabled datasets.  Default is false.

BUILD_SHARED_LIBS    : (True/False) Build shared libraries instead of static
                       libraries.

XDMF_PLUGIN          : (True/False) Build the plugin for reading and writing
                       files in the XDMF data format.

EXODUS_PLUGIN        : (True/False) Build the plugin for reading and writing 
                       ExodusII meshes.


Documentation
-------------

The source code is documented using Doxygen directives. To generate the
documentation for the library, change into the build directory and run

$ make htmldoc

This will generate HTML documentation for the library and place the main
documentation file in xdm-build/doc/api_doc/index.html

If you prefer LaTeX documentation, you can run

$ make latexdoc 

to build documentation in LaTeX.