2.5 System Properties

System properties are a way of getting information into the Java runtime - they are a bit like environment variables. There are two ways to set them when using STILTS: either on the command line using arguments of the form -Dname=value (see Section 2.2) or in a file in your home directory called .starjava.properties, in the form of a name=value line. Thus submitting the flag

    -Dvotable.strict=true

    #  Force strict interpretation of the VOTable standard.
    votable.strict=true

The following system properties have special significance to STILTS:

java.io.tmpdir

The directory in which STILTS will write any temporary files it needs. This is usually only done if the -disk flag has been specified (see Section 2.4).

jdbc.drivers

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of JDBC driver classes using which SQL databases can be accessed (see Section 2.6).

jel.classes

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of classes containing static methods which define user-provided functions for synthetic columns or subsets. (see Section 4.6.3).

startable.readers

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format input handler classes (see SUN/252).

startable.storage

Can be set to determine the default storage policy. Setting it to "disk" has basically the same effect as supplying the "-disk" argument on the command line (see Section 2.4).

startable.writers

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format output handler classes (see SUN/252).

votable.strict

Set true for strict enforcement of the VOTable standard when parsing VOTables. This prevents the parser from working round certain common errors, such as missing arraysize attributes on FIELD or PARAM elements with datatype="char". False by default.