Rerun

Configure the viewer through code

As of Rerun 0.15, the state of the blueprint can be directly manipulated using the Rerun SDK.

In the initial 0.15 release, the APIs are still somewhat limited and only available in the Python SDK. Future releases will add support for the full scope of blueprint. See issues: #5519, #5520, #5521.

Blueprint API overview

All blueprint APIs are in the rerun.blueprint namespace. In our python examples, we typically import this using the rrb alias:

import rerun.blueprint as rrb

The python blueprint API is declarative and object-centric. There are 3 main types of blueprint objects you will encounter:

  • Blueprint: The root object that represents the entire viewer layout.
  • Container: A layout object that contains other containers or views.
  • SpaceView: A view object that represents a single view of the data.

Both containers and spaceviews should be used via typed subclasses instead.:

  • Container has subclasses: Horizontal, Vertical, Grid, and Tabs.
  • SpaceView has subclasses: BarChartView, Spatial2DView, Spatial3DView, TensorView, TextDocumentView, TextLogView, and TimeSeriesView.

These paths can be combined hierarchically to create a complex viewer layout.

For example:

my_blueprint = rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.Horizontal(
        rrb.BarChartView(),
        rrb.Vertical(
            rrb.Spatial2DView(),
            rrb.Spatial3DView(),
        ),
    ),
)

Sending the blueprint to the viewer

To provide a blueprint, simply pass it to either init or connect using the default_blueprint parameter.

Using init with spawn=True:

my_blueprint = rrb.Blueprint(...)

rr.init("rerun_example_my_blueprint", spawn=True, default_blueprint=my_blueprint)

Or if you use connect separate from init:

my_blueprint = rrb.Blueprint(...)

rr.init("rerun_example_my_blueprint")

...

rr.connect(default_blueprint=my_blueprint)

Activating the default blueprint

Just like the viewer can store many different recordings internally, it can also store many different blueprints. For each application_id in the viewer, are two particularly important blueprints: the "default blueprint" and the "active blueprint".

When a recording is selected, the active blueprint for the corresponding application_id will completely determine what is displayed by the viewer.

When you send a blueprint to the viewer, it will not necessarily be activated immediately. The standard behavior is to only update the "default blueprint" in the viewer. This minimizes the chance that you accidentally overwrite blueprint edits you may have made locally.

If you want to start using the new blueprint, after sending it, you will need to click the reset button (reset icon) in the blueprint panel. This resets the active blueprint to the current default.

Always activating the blueprint

If you want to always activate the blueprint as soon as it is received, you can instead use the send_blueprint API. This API has two flags make_active and make_default, both of which default to True.

If make_active is set, the blueprint will be activated immediately. Exercise care in using this API, as it can be surprising for users to have their blueprint changed without warning.

my_blueprint = rrb.Blueprint(...)

rr.init("rerun_example_my_blueprint", spawn=True)

rr.send_blueprint(my_blueprint, make_active=True)

Customizing space views

Any of the space views (BarChartView, Spatial2DView, Spatial3DView, TensorView, TextDocumentView, TextLogView, or TimeSeriesView) can be instantiated with no arguments. By default these views try to include all compatible entities.

For example, the following blueprint creates a single 3D view that includes all the 3D content you have logged to the entity tree:

rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.Spatial3DView()
)

Beyond instantiating the space views, there are 3 parameters you may want to specify: name, origin, and contents.

name is simply the name of the view used as a label in the viewer.

However, both origin and contents play an important role in determining what data is included in the view.

origin

The origin of a space-view is a generalized "frame of reference" for the view. We think of showing all data in the space view as relative to the origin.

By default, only data that is under the origin will be included in the view. As such this is one of the most convenient ways of restricting a space-view to a particular subtree.

Because the data in the space-view is relative to the origin, the origin will be the first entity displayed in the blueprint tree, with all entities under the origin shown using relative paths.

For Spatial views such as Spatial2DView and Spatial3DView, the origin plays an additional role with respect to data transforms. All data in the view will be transformed to the origin space before being displayed. See Spaces and Transforms for more information.

For example:

rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.Horizontal(
        rrb.Spatial3DView(origin="/world"),
        rrb.Spatial2DView(origin="/world/robot/camera"),
    )
)

contents

If you need to further modify the contents of a space view, you can use the contents parameter. This parameter is a list of entity query expressions that are either included or excluded from the view.

Each entity expressions starts with "+" for inclusion or "-" for an exclusion. The expressions can either be specific entity paths, or may end in a wildcard /** to include all entities under a specific subtree.

When combining multiple expressions, the "most specific" rule wins.

Additionally, these expressions can reference $origin to refer to the origin of the space view.

For example:

rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.Horizontal(
        rrb.Spatial3DView(
            origin="/world",
            contents=[
                "+ $origin/robot/**",
            ],
        ),
        rrb.Spatial2DView(
            origin="/world/robot/camera",
            contents=[
                "+ $origin/**",
                "+ /world/robot/actuator/**",
            ],
        ),
    )
)

Implicit conversion

For convenience all of the blueprint APIs take a BlueprintLike rather than requiring a Blueprint object. Both SpaceViews and Containers are considered BlueprintLike. Similarly, the Blueprint object can take a SpaceView or Container as an argument.

All of the following are equivalent:

rr.send_blueprint(rrb.Spatial3DView())

rr.send_blueprint(
    rrb.Grid(
        Spatial3DView(),
    )
)

rr.send_blueprint(
    rrb.Blueprint(
        Spatial3DView(),
    ),
)


rr.send_blueprint(
    rrb.Blueprint(
        rrb.Grid(
            Spatial3DView(),
        )
    ),
)

Customizing the top-level blueprint

The top-level Blueprint object can also be customized.

Controlling the panel state

The Blueprint controls the default panel-state of the 3 panels: the BlueprintPanel, the SelectionPanel, and the TimePanel. These can be controlled by passing them as additional arguments to the Blueprint constructor.

rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.TimePanel(expanded=False)
)

As an convenience, you can also use the blueprint argument: collapse_panels=True as a short-hand for:

rrb.Blueprint(
    rrb.TimePanel(expanded=False),
    rrb.SelectionPanel(expanded=False),
    rrb.BlueprintPanel(expanded=False),
)

Controlling the auto behaviors

The blueprint has two additional parameters that influence the behavior of the viewer:

  • auto_space_views controls whether the viewer will automatically create space views for entities that are not explicitly included in the blueprint.
  • auto_layout controls whether the viewer should automatically layout the containers when introducing new space-views.

If you pass in your own SpaceView or Container objects, these will both default to False so that the Blueprint you get is exactly what you specify. Otherwise they will default to True so that you will still get content (this matches the default behavior of the viewer if no blueprint is provided).

This means that:

rrb.Blueprint()

and

rrb.Blueprint(
    auto_space_views=True,
    auto_layout=True
)

are both equivalent to the viewer's default behavior.

If you truly want to create an empty blueprint, you must set both values to False:

rrb.Blueprint(
    auto_space_views=False,
    auto_layout=False
),
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