christianAppl opened a new pull request, #511:
URL: https://github.com/apache/poi/pull/511
**TL;DR:**
I would like to suggest, to not create artificial rows and cells for tables
in read documents, to prevent the misrepresentation of documents.
**Problematic behaviour:**
In org.apache.poi.xwpf.usermodel.XWPFTable the constructor assumes, that a
table should at least contain one row. Should a table not contain 'tr'
elements, such an element is created artificially:
```Java
public XWPFTable(CTTbl table, IBody part) {
this.part = part;
this.ctTbl = table;
// is an empty table: I add one row and one column as default
if (table.sizeOfTrArray() == 0) {
createEmptyTable(table);
}
...
```
**Claims and intentions:**
I can see how this could possibly be usefull, when creating a document.
However I would prefer it, if POI would not create such table rows, when
reading a preexisting document.
This is especially problematic, as this is not even checking for all
possible contents.
According to: "ECMA-376-1:2016 Office Open XML File Formats — Fundamentals
and Markup Language Reference"
Chapter "17.5.2.30 sdt (Row-Level Structured Document Tag)"
A table must not necessarily contain the rows directly, but may contain row
sdts instead.
This behaviour of POI lead to the creation of an artificial and unwanted
row, for the following table:
```
<w:tbl>
<w:tblPr>
<w:tblStyle w:val="Tabellenraster"/>
<w:tblW w:w="0" w:type="auto"/>
<w:tblLook w:val="04A0" w:firstRow="1" w:lastRow="0"
w:firstColumn="1" w:lastColumn="0" w:noHBand="0" w:noVBand="1"/>
</w:tblPr>
<w:tblGrid>
<w:gridCol w:w="9062"/>
</w:tblGrid>
<w:sdt>
<w:sdtContent>
<w:tr>
<w:sdt>
<w:sdtContent>
<w:tc>
<w:p>
<w:r>
<w:t>Test</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
</w:tc>
</w:sdtContent>
</w:sdt>
</w:tr>
</w:sdtContent>
</w:sdt>
</w:tbl>
```
Which is not containing table rows as direct children, but can obviously not
be treated as being "empty".
This PR contains my suggestion on how to seperate the reading and writing of
tables and to prevent the creation of superfluous contents, that would
misrepresent the original document.
Even if a table had been empty in the original, I would prefer it to reflect
that in the resulting POI representation.
**Further suggestion:**
I would suggest to remove this feature entirely, as I can imagine how this
could be counterproductive during writing aswell, but as I am mostly interested
in reading such documents, I have not outright removed:
```
if (table.sizeOfTrArray() == 0) {
createEmptyTable(table);
}
```
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