String table workspaces don't match when saved & loaded

[Samuel Jackson]

I tried saving out a table workspace full of string data, then doing a CheckWorkspacesMatch for a system test.

It turns out that string data gets padded to align in in the centre of the column when saved (in NexusFileIO). This makes it look nice, but causes CheckWorkspacesMatch to fail as the two strings no longer match!

[Russell Taylor]

I'll take this as I put the TableWorkspace comparison into CheckWorkspacesMatch. The summary of the solution is that formatting of the output should not be a responsibility of the table workspace.

[Russell Taylor]

The white space isn't for formatting, it's so that the entire column is saved in one long block of characters where an equal number of characters (the longest string in the column) correspond to each cell.

I'm not at all sure saving the data in this manner is necessary, or that it's the best way to do it, but I don't think I can change it without potentially breaking previously saved files. So I'll just fix things at the loading end.

[Russell Taylor]

Re #8184. Fix error in generating log message.

Changeset: 81439d02e055e9a8e6a84c8c9f51b6d606dd5829

[Russell Taylor]

Re #8184. Add a test for loading a TableWorkspace.

Fails right now because of the extra whitespace at the end of entries in the string column.

Changeset: 7d679dbcc31baffc93a53c696e0413f1365c9c29

[Russell Taylor]

Re #8184. Remove whitespace at the end of loaded strings.

The entries in columns of string type are, for better or worse, saved in fixed-length strings which are padded with whitespace. This removes that whitespace on loading so that the table is unchanged compared to the original.

Changeset: 06d8c83698458d910b9dcb838c753a25f8cae610

[Russell Taylor]

Re #8184. Remove code that can't be reached.

Just clearing coverity warnings while I'm touching the file.

Changeset: 1f3571374c8fbbc60814d0a83ff05adaf2c169d3

[Russell Taylor]

Re #8184. Clear coverity warning while I'm touching the file.

The warning was that a dynamic_cast was used, but the outcome not being checked. This is because we know it to be a TextAxis at this point - therefore, just use a static_cast.

Changeset: 8ff0433f38771e96c1844b9f3f0612966d1daef4

[Russell Taylor]

To test: Create a table workspace containing at least one column of string type, save it, reload it back and observe that CheckWorkspacesMatch succeeds where it previously failed.

[Samuel Jackson]

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/bugfix/8184_saved_tableworkspace_whitespace'

Full changeset: ​1ca115e638e935acfb91139b07acc2c4dbe3968f

[Stuart Campbell]

This ticket has been transferred to github issue ​9029