paraview crashing/freezing when opening Tecplot file

I just downloaded the paraview 5.3 newest release for Mac OS, and it doesn't seem to want to open a Tecplot file. The program just hangs there without ever doing anything.

The file is ~200mb(sorry!). If you want to try it out, I uploaded to to the following location: http://www.filedropper.com/rp2realfluid20170313tecplot

I have verified that the file is written correctly, because I was able to open it with Tecplot.

@chet.nieter can you see what's going on here please? thanks

@chrisneal I am assuming this worked with 5.2, is that correct?

I have not tried to open it using Paraview 5.2. I will give it a shot later tonight/tomorrow morning to see what happens.

@utkarsh.ayachit I just tried to open it with 5.2 RC1 that I had, and I get the spinning beachball of death. I see the output messages window pop up, but that's all that ever happens. Just locks up.

The machine is running OSX Yosemite 10.10.5.

After 11 hours, Paraview 5.2 is still frozen/locked up with a spinning beachball of death from trying to open that tecplot file.

There appears to be some issues with how the Tecplot reader is processing the tokens in the Tecplot file. When I run paraview from the console I see errors like this streaming by:

ERROR: In ../VTK/IO/Geometry/vtkTecplotReader.cxx, line 1898
vtkTecplotReader (0x7fd686b15cb0): /Users/chet.nieter/projects/TecPlotBug/RP2_realfluid_20170313_TECPLOT.dat: The record type 174.098556367 found in the file is unknown.

It looks like the Tecplot reader is searching for a token in the data section of the Tecplot file.

I should also mention that I was able to reproduce the problem with the 5.2 and 5.3 binaries.

I added a "title" section to the top of the file to see if that helped the reader get over that infinite loop, but it didn't seem to change anything.

Ascii Format: https://lost-contact.mit.edu/afs/wam.umd.edu/department/engr/software/tecplot/360-2008/Solaris/doc/tecplot/dataformat.pdf

In the header of the data file there is a line with c = black which is grouped in what I assume is the zone header. The Tecplot reader is unaware of this option so it assumes this is the end of the zone header when it actually isn't. This option does not appear to be listed in the chart of the zone header keywords in the documentation you linked to either. If I remove that line ParaView is able to read the data file.

The c keyword doesn't appear in documentation for the most current version of Tecplot either. http://download.tecplot.com/360/current/360_data_format_guide.pdf

You are right Chet. It looks like it is an issue of an older formatted file. From the newer documentation it looks like those keywords should be 'color' and 'datapacking' instead of 'c' and 'f'. Tecplot probably has a legacy set of readers that detected the format and read it in.

If anyone else has an issue with legacy tecplot files not loading into Paraview similar to this one, I just went above the 'zone' section in the file and did the following:

Before: zone t="debugging" f = point c = black

After: geometry f = point c = black zone t="debugging"

Thank you for helping me out @chet.nieter and @utkarsh.ayachit !

closed

@utkarsh.ayachit While debugging this I noticed that adding a return after the error message that was repeating prevented ParaView from freezing since it then bails on reading the file. Should we consider committing this change?

@chet.nieter , yup. that makes sense to me.

mentioned in merge request vtk/vtk!2598 (merged)