7.3.1 Generic VOTable Read

The simplest way to read tables from a VOTable document is to use the generic table reading method described in Section 3.2 (or Section 3.3 for streaming) in which you just submit the location of a document to a StarTableFactory, and get back one or more StarTable objects. If you're after one of several TABLE elements in a document, you can specify this by giving its number as the URL's fragment ID (the bit after the '#' sign, or the third argument of streamStarTable for streaming).

The following code would give you StarTables read from the first and fourth TABLE elements in the file "tabledoc.xml":

    StarTableFactory factory = new StarTableFactory();
    StarTable tableA = factory.makeStarTable( "tabledoc.xml", "votable" );
    StarTable tableB = factory.makeStarTable( "tabledoc.xml#3", "votable" );

    VOTableBuilder votBuilder = new VOTableBuilder();
    boolean wantRandom = false;
    StoragePolicy policy = StoragePolicy.getDefaultPolicy();
    StarTable tableA =
        votBuilder.makeStarTable( DataSource.makeDataSource( "tabledoc.xml" ),
                                  wantRandom, policy );
    StarTable tableB =
        votBuilder.makeStarTable( DataSource.makeDataSource( "tabledoc.xml#3" ),
                                  wantRandom, policy );

If you want all the tables in the document, do this:

    VOTableBuilder votBuilder = new VOTableBuilder();
    DataSource datsrc = DataSource.makeDataSource( "tabledoc.xml" );
    StoragePolicy policy = StoragePolicy.getDefaultPolicy();
    TableSequence tseq = votBuilder.makeStarTables( datsrc, policy );
    List tList = new ArrayList();
    for ( StarTable table; ( table = tseq.nextTable() ) != null; ) {
        tList.add( table );
    }

All the data and metadata from the TABLEs in the VOTable document are available from the resulting StarTable objects, as table parameters, ColumnInfos or the data themselves. If you are just trying to extract the data and metadata from a single TABLE element somewhere in a VOTable document, this procedure is probably all you need.