Problem 2504

Summary:	HepRepXML functionality deprecated, HepRepFile not a suitable replacement
Product:	Geant4	Reporter:	Grant <gvriley>
Component:	visualization/HepRep	Assignee:	Laurent Garnier <laurent.garnier>
Status:	ASSIGNED ---
Severity:	minor	CC:	Alberto.Ribon
Priority:	P4
Version:	11.0
Hardware:	All
OS:	All

Description Grant 2022-08-03 17:13:56 CEST

Hello, 
our institution has 20-40 users of Geant4 who will be affected by the 11.0+ deprecation of HepRepXML support. Attempting to output a HepRepXML causes Geant4/11.0+ to crash. We have been able to create .heprep files by changing our output to HepRepFile but these files do not work in our visualizer of choice.  We can stay with 10.07p02 for a while but when we migrate officially to 11.0 this will be an issue.
https://geant4-data.web.cern.ch/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotes.11.0.html
The line which mentions HepRep(WIRED) appears to have broken HepRepXML output.

We use GeantToVTK plugin and primarily view in Paraview.  

It's strange to me that the HepRepFile was kept since it's a HepRep1.0 format, HepRepXML is the HepRep2.0 format and according to the HepRep website 2.0 was supposed to be the standard moving forward (this was a post from many years ago however) https://www.slac.stanford.edu/~perl/heprep/index.html 

I have not been able to find a good method to use HepRepFile outputs in our chosen viewer. Any advice on how to use HepRepFile with paraview, or comments on the deprecation of HepRepXML are welcome.

Best wishes,
Grant Riley

Comment 1 Grant 2022-10-17 17:56:10 CEST

Hello, 

Is there any update on this issue? 
If this deprecation is going to stand as-is I would be very grateful for a recommendation of which visualization format to migrate into. Preferably one with a long planned support lifetime.

Best Wishes,
Grant