Remove automatic naming of vector components

Feature Requests
1

As a follow-up to Automatic naming of tensor components, I’d like to suggest to remove the automatic naming of components when a vector of length 6 is found.

The reasons for that are

  1. The assumption that a vector of length 6 represents a symmetric 3x3 tensor is probably often, but certainly not always, right.
  2. Different conventions for ordering the shear components are used, a common notation is Voigt notation [11,22,33,23,13,12], which is not what ParaView uses [11,22,33,12,23,13].

So, in agreement with

Mathieu Westphal (Kitware) mwestphal
I agree, and I mean to say that maybe the automatic naming of symmetric tensor is already confusing people. I added the naming some years ago thinking it was considered standard.

I believe that the automatic naming has more disadvantages than advantages. Explicit names provided by the application that generates the data is the way to go.

2

I’ve implemented this in https://gitlab.kitware.com/MartinDiehl/paraview/-/commits/MartinDiehl/remove-automated-labeling-of-6-vector.

Note that automatic naming for vectors (‘X’, ‘Y’, ‘Z’) is still there. This is IMHO slightly inconsistent but reasonable because the chance that a vector of length 3 is represents spatial coordinates is pretty high. Still, if there is consensus that it’s better to avoid assumptions that might be wrong in rare cases, this would be a good moment to remove it.

3

While I’m not against this, this should be deferred to @cory.quammen for a decision I think.