A few items of the table metadata
(name,
URL)
are available directly as values from the StarTable interface.
A general parameter mechanism is provided for storing other items,
for instance user-defined ones.
The getParameters
method returns a list of
DescribedValue
objects which contain a scalar or array value and some metadata describing it
(name, units,
Unified Content Descriptor).
This list can be read or altered as required.
The StarTable interface also contains
the methods
getColumnCount
and getRowCount
to determine the shape of the table. Note however that for tables
with sequential-only access, it may not be possible to ascertain
the number of rows - in this case getRowCount will return -1.
Random-access tables (see Section 2.3) will always return
a positive row count.