Consider a PDE problem with three dependent variables
Using the standard diff command you can compute the total derivative of this expression with respect to or . It is not possible, however, to differentiate with respect to any of the functions in or its partial derivatives. For that purpose you can use D_Dx
Note that the result is presented in jetvariables jet notation, a compact mathematical notation understood by all the symmetry commands of PDEtools. To have this result expressed in function notation use FromJet or directly call D_Dx with the option jetnotation = false
In this other example it is computed the partial derivative with respect to followed by the total derivative with respect to
In the input above, instead of u[x] you can write diff(u(x,t), x) (function notation) or u[1] (this is the jetnumbers jetnotation), all of them representing the same mathematical object.
You can also work with directly in more compact jetnotation; compare with (4.3)
Compute now the total derivative with respect to comparing the results of differentiating and its jet version