RowListStarTable
.JoinStarTable
can now
deduplicate column names.ConcatStarTable
permits adding the rows of one table after the rows of another.RowSequence
interface
has been modified; a new
close
method has been introduced, and the old
advance()
and getRowIndex()
methods have been
withdrawn (these latter were not very useful and in some cases
problematic to implement).
setName()
and setURL()
have been added to the StarTable
interface.
StoragePolicy
class was
introduced, which allows you to influence whether cached table data are
stored in memory or on disk.
This has led to backwardly-incompatible changes to public interfaces and
classes:
makeStarTable
now takes a new StoragePolicy
argument, and
VOElementFactory
's methods
are now instance methods rather than static ones.
StarTableFactory
class's
makeStarTable
methods now come in two flavours - with and
without a format name. This corresponds to two table reading modes:
named format mode and automatic format detection mode.
In named format mode you specify the format of the table you are
trying to read and in automatic format detection mode you rely
on the factory to work it out
using magic numbers. Although automatic detection works well
for VOTable and FITS, it's poor for text-based formats like
ASCII and CSV.
This has resulted in addition of some new two-argument
makeStarTable
methods and the withdrawal of the
getBuilders
method in favour of two new methods
getDefaultBuilders
and
getKnownBuilders
(similarly for setter methods) which deal with the handlers
used in automatic detection mode and the ones available for
named format mode respectively.
Note that the ASCII table format is not automatically detected,
so to use ASCII tables you now have to specify the format explicitly.
VOElement
class
has been rewritten and now implements the DOM
Element
interface.
This means that the hierarchical structure which you can navigate
to obtain information about the VOTable document and extract
table data actually is a DOM rather than just being sat
on top of one. You can therefore now use it just as a normal
DOM tree (making use of the methods defined in the
org.w3c.dom
interface,
interoperating with third-party components which require a DOM).
This has had a number of additional benefits and consequences:
VOElementFactory
class now has instance methods rather than static methods.
StoragePolicy.DISCARD
into a VOElementFactory
it is now possible to obtain a data-less
(structure only, hence minimal resource) VOTable DOM.
TableSink
methods
now throw exceptions.
StarTableFactory
's list for automatic format detection,
but CSV-format tables can be loaded using named format mode.
The format is intended to match the (widely-used) variety used by
Microsoft Excel amongst others (with optional column names).
basic-fits
").
StoragePolicy
).
Short
/Float
types in preference to Integer
/Double
if the input data make this appropriate.
d
or D
as an exponent letter
as well as e
or E
.
uk.ac.starlink.table.join
.
These work and have full javadocs, but
they are still experimental, subject to substantial change in future
releases, and not documented properly in this document.
NULL_VALUE_INFO
)
Nulls in FITS and VOTable/FITS tables are now preserved correctly
on output.
TCOMMx
headers.
EmptyStarTable
added.