Templates

A template is a pipeline state with the source nodes and visualization nodes stripped out — only the transform graph and its connectivity remain. What’s left is a recipe for processing data, decoupled from where the data came from or how it’s displayed.

The point is reuse. Once you’ve assembled a useful chain of transforms — an alignment + reconstruction recipe, a segmentation workflow, a denoising pipeline — saving it as a template lets you apply the same chain to any source you load next. The same template can be applied to many different sources over the course of a session.

Loading and Saving Templates

Templates live in Tomviz state files (.tvsm and .tvh5). There are two ways to load and save them.

From the File menu. Load Template opens a file picker and applies the chosen template to the current pipeline. Save Template As writes the current pipeline to a state file with the sources, sinks, and sink groups filtered out — what remains on disk is just the transform-only graph.

From the Pipeline templates menu. A dedicated top-level menu lists templates that Tomviz discovers automatically in a known set of directories. Out of the box this includes the bundled share/tomviz/templates/ directory that ships with the application, plus a user templates directory under your Tomviz user data path. You can override the user location by setting the TOMVIZ_PIPELINE_TEMPLATES_PATH environment variable to a list of directories — Tomviz will then scan those instead. The menu also exposes a Save Template entry that saves the current pipeline into the first of those directories (so it shows up in the menu on the next scan) and prompts only for a name rather than a full path.

Using Regular State Files as Templates

Because a template is just a stripped-down state file, the loader will happily accept any regular state file via Load Template as well. When it does, source nodes, sink nodes, sink groups, and any links touching them are dropped, along with view layout and palette information. Only the transforms and the links between them are loaded into the current pipeline.

This means an existing .tvsm or .tvh5 you saved as a full session can be reused as a template against a different source, without having to manually re-save it as one.