# Remove automatic naming of vector components
**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366
**Category:** Feature Requests
**Created:** [December 12, 2025, 8:08am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366 "2025-12-12T08:08:18Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@MarDiehl](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/MarDiehl)
#### Post date: [December 12, 2025, 8:08am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366/1 "2025-12-12T08:08:18Z")
As a follow-up to [Automatic naming of tensor components](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/automatic-naming-of-tensor-components/8762), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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)](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal) [mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/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.
---
### Author:  [@MarDiehl](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/MarDiehl)
#### Post date: [December 12, 2025, 8:59am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366/2 "2025-12-12T08:59:00Z")
I’ve implemented this in [https://gitlab.kitware.com/MartinDiehl/paraview/-/commits/MartinDiehl/remove-automated-labeling-of-6-vector](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.
---
### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [December 12, 2025, 12:15pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366/3 "2025-12-12T12:15:12Z")
While I’m not against this, this should be deferred to @cory.quammen for a decision I think.
---
### Author:  [@MarDiehl](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/MarDiehl)
#### Post date: [December 17, 2025, 5:49am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366/4 "2025-12-17T05:49:55Z")
@cory.quammen: I’ve opened [https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/merge\_requests/7617](https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/merge_requests/7617).
---
### Author:  [@cory.quammen](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cory.quammen)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2026, 12:09pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/remove-automatic-naming-of-vector-components/17366/5 "2026-01-06T12:09:07Z")
Automatic naming that is wrong in potentially a lot of scenarios is bad. I agree we should not do so in the case of vector arrays of length 6.