[vtkusers] Paraview bug found in pvtu files containing polyhedrons

[Andrew Parker]

Dear All,

I have recently been having problems reading pvtu files in paraview when those files contain arbitrary polyhedrons: this is from the output of a large scale code that runs in parallel via mpi.  To show the problem, I have written a very small sample code, attached, that runs in serial but reproduces the salient issues experienced by my larger code when run in parallel.  It is clear, via the toggling a boolean, that the problem happens when vtk_polyhedrons types are used.  There is a short description at the top of the bug.cxx file, followed by instructions.  I use stock versions of paraview here, although self compiled ones show no difference.

In short compile the code, run it, and open the pvtu file in paraview.  You should see 4 cells.
Switch the “bug” bool to true, recompile, re-run it, and reopen the pvtu file.  The screen will be blank.  

The only difference is that cells are added to the unstructured grid explicitly as vtk_polyhedrons using a face-stream, rather than as hexs.  I cannot do this in the real code!  The rest of the code is just there to produce the “serial” mesh, and threshold this mesh to produce two “parallel-partition” meshes.  I use the new ghost type framework as this is consistent with the real code, and this runs and compiles on OS X and gcc.  Likewise it has been build against vtk 6.3 and the bug manifests itself in paraview 4.4 and 5.0.  Visit 2.10 does not have this bug and can correctly open the pvtu containing polyhedrons: this is my current workaround.

Can any of the developers shed light on this?  Is a fix known, if so when will it be released?  Do others have this problem [1, 2, 3] outside of those long reported? Does anyone else have workarounds?

Any help really appreciated, 
Andy

[1] http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2015-May/090835.html
[2] https://cmake.org/pipermail/paraview/2012-October/026456.html
[3] https://cmake.org/pipermail/paraview/2015-January/032950.html

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