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3.3 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 3.2) or in a file in your home directory named .starjava.properties, in the form of a name=value line. Thus submitting the flag

   -Dvotable.strict=true
on the command line is equivalent to having the following in your .starjava.properties file:
   #  Force strict interpretation of the VOTable standard.
   votable.strict=true

The following system properties have special significance to STILTS:

http.proxyHost
Can be used to force HTTP access to go via a named proxy; may be required if you are attempting access to remote data or services from behind a firewall configured to block direct HTTP connections. See java documentation for this property for more details.
java.awt.headless
May need to be set to "true" if running the plotting tasks on a headless server. You only need to worry about this if you see error messages complaining about headlessness.
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 2.1).
jdbc.drivers
Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of JDBC driver classes using which SQL databases can be accessed (see Section 3.4).
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 9.7.3).
mark.workaround
If set to "true", this will work around a bug in the mark()/reset() methods of some java InputStream classes. These are rather common, including in Sun's J2SE system libraries. Use this if you are seeing errors that say something like "Resetting to invalid mark". Currently defaults to "false".
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 2.1). Other possible values are "adaptive", "memory", "sideways" and "discard"; see SUN/252. The default is "adaptive", which means storing smaller tables in memory, and larger ones on disk.
startable.writers
Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format output handler classes (see SUN/252).
votable.namespacing
Determines how namespacing is handled in VOTable documents. Known values are "none" (no namespacing, xmlns declarations in VOTable document will probably confuse parser), "lax" (anything that looks like it is probably a VOTable element will be treated as a VOTable element) and "strict" (VOTable elements must be properly declared in one of the correct VOTable namespaces). May also be set to the classname of a uk.ac.starlink.votable.Namespacing implementation. The default is "lax".
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.


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STILTS - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library Tool Set
Starlink User Note256
STILTS web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Mailing list: topcat-user@bristol.ac.uk