SaveNexus not saving Table workspaces correctly

[Samuel Jackson]

I've noticed that saving a table workspace with a column defined as type float doesn't appear to get loaded back in (may not even be saved?). However, if I set the column type to be string it saves and loads it correctly.

The problem can be reproduced by running the following script:

fname = "/tmp/test.txt"

tableWs = CreateEmptyTableWorkspace(OutputWorkspace="Test")
tableWs.addColumn("str", "Name")
tableWs.addColumn("float", "Value")

tableWs.addRow(['Hello', 1.35])

SaveNexus(tableWs, fname)
Load(fname, OutputWorkspace="Test2")

[Karl Palmen]

HDFView shows that only one column is saved, so it is a fault with SaveNexus (rather than loadNexus).

[Karl Palmen]

It works if one uses 'double' instead of 'float'.

[Karl Palmen]

Only column types of string, integer or double are saved to Nexus. Tickets have been issued for the other types, including #8603 for float.

Documentation of Table Workspaces at http://www.mantidproject.org/Table_Workspaces has been modified to indicated this.

To test, run the example python script, ammended with double instead of float. Check that the non-support of float is clearly indicated in the above mentioned wiki page and ticket #8603 deals with the situation.

[Samuel Jackson]

All the points in comment 7 are valid, but I'm wondering if there's any way we can at least output a warning in NexusFileIO to the user that columns are going to be skipped? If this isn't feasible then I'm happy to pass this ticket.

[Samuel Jackson]

Discussed with Karl. We can have another ticket (#8799) to handle adding a warning for users.

[Stuart Campbell]

This ticket has been transferred to github issue ​9440