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### 5.3 Input Schemes

As well as being able to load tables from external data streams, STILTS offers a way to specify tables that do not correspond to a stream of bytes. These may be defined programmatically or interact with external services in some way that is not as straightforward as decoding a stream of bytes.

Such tables are defined using different schemes, and scheme specifications may be used in the same places as input table names, for instance as the value of the `in` parameter in `tpipe` and other commands. If an input location parameter (`in`) uses a scheme specification, the corresponding input format parameter (`ifmt`) is ignored.

The form of a scheme specification is:

       :<scheme-name>:<scheme-specific-part>

so that for instance "`in=:loop:10`" specifies a 10-row single-column table, as described by the loop scheme documentation below. For an example of using such tables, you can try running for instance

       stilts plot2plane in=:attractor:1e7,clifford layer1=mark shading1=density densemap1=plasma x1=x y1=y

The following subsections describe all the schemes that are available by default. It is also possible to add new schemes at runtime by using the `startable.schemes` system property.

- 5.3.1 `skysim`
- 5.3.2 `attractor`
- 5.3.3 `jdbc`
- 5.3.4 `loop`
- 5.3.5 `test`
- 5.3.6 `class`

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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@jiscmail.ac.uk