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### 5.2 Table Load Dialogues

Some graphical components exist to make it easier to load or save tables. They are effectively table-friendly alternatives to using a `JFileChooser`.

In earlier versions of the library, there was a drop-in component which gave you a ready-made dialogue to load tables from a wide range of sources (local file, JDBC database, VO services, etc). However, this was not widely used and imposed some restrictions (dialogue modality) on the client application, so at STIL version 3.0 they have been withdrawn. There is still a pluggable framework for implementing and using source-specific load dialogues, but client code now has to do a bit more work to incorporate these into an actual application. This is what TOPCAT does.

The main interface for this functionality is `TableLoadDialog`. Implementations of this interface provide a GUI component which allows the user to specify what table will be loaded, and performs the load of one or more tables based on this specification when requested to do so. An application can embed instances of this into user-visible windows in order to provide load functionality. A number of `TableLoadDialog` implementations are provided within STIL for access to local disk, JDBC databases etc. The starjava set contains more, including access to virtual observatory services. Further custom load types can be provided at runtime by providing additional implementations of this interface. The partial implementation `AbstractTableLoadDialog` is provided for the convenience of implementors.

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STIL - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library
Starlink User Note252
STIL web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk