stilts-regquery - Queries the VO registry
stilts regquery [query=<value>]
[regurl=<url-value>] [soapout=<out-file>]
[ocmd=<cmds>]
[omode=out|meta|stats|count|cgi|discard|topcat|samp|tosql|gui]
[out=<out-table>] [ofmt=<out-format>]
regquery submits a query to the Virtual Observatory
registry and returns the result as a table containing all the records which
match the condition specified. The resulting table can be written out in any
of the supported formats or otherwise processed in the usual ways. Making
use of this command requires an understanding of the VOResource schema.
It is important to note that the results of this command give a
very much flattened and incomplete view of the results of a full registry
query. That is because the contents of an IVOA Registry (see the IVOA
Resource Metadata and VOResource documents for more detail) are hierarchical
and cannot be faithfully represented in a simple tabular structure. Other
superior registry search clients exist; this command is just useful for
viewing the results in a rather simplified way which can be represented as a
table.
- query=<value>
Text of an ADQL WHERE clause targeted at the VOResource
1.0 schema defining which resource records you wish to retrieve from the
registry. Some examples are:
- @xsi:type like '%Organisation%'
- capability/@standardID = 'ivo://ivoa.net/std/ConeSearch' and title like
'%SDSS%'
- curation/publisher like 'CDS%' and title like '%galax%'
A full description of ADQL syntax and of the VOResource schema is
well beyond the scope of this documentation, but in general you want to use
<field-name> like '<value>' where '%' is a
wildcard character. Logical operators and and or and
parentheses can be used to group and combine expressions. To work out the
various <field-name>s you need to look at the VOResource 1.0
schema; you can find some more discussion in the documentation of the NVO
IVOARegistry package.
- regurl=<url-value>
The URL of a SOAP endpoint which provides a VOResource1.0
IVOA registry service. Some known suitable registry endpoints at time of
writing are
- http://registry.astrogrid.org/astrogrid-registry/services/RegistryQueryv1_0
- http://registry.euro-vo.org/services/RegistrySearch
- http://vao.stsci.edu/directory/ristandardservice.asmx
- soapout=<out-file>
If set to a non-null value, this gives the destination
for the text of the request and response SOAP messages. The special value
"-" indicates standard output.
- ocmd=<cmds>
Specifies processing to be performed on the output table,
after all other processing has taken place. The value of this parameter is one
or more of the filter commands described in SUN/256. If more than one is
given, they must be separated by semicolon characters (";"). This
parameter can be repeated multiple times on the same command line to build up
a list of processing steps. The sequence of commands given in this way defines
the processing pipeline which is performed on the table.
Commands may alteratively be supplied in an external file, by
using the indirection character '@'. Thus a value of
"@filename" causes the file filename to be read for
a list of filter commands to execute. The commands in the file may be
separated by newline characters and/or semicolons, and lines which are blank
or which start with a '#' character are ignored.
- omode=out|meta|stats|count|cgi|discard|topcat|samp|tosql|gui
The mode in which the result table will be output. The
default mode is
out, which means that the result will be written as a
new table to disk or elsewhere, as determined by the
out and
ofmt parameters. However, there are other possibilities, which
correspond to uses to which a table can be put other than outputting it, such
as displaying metadata, calculating statistics, or populating a table in an
SQL database. For some values of this parameter, additional parameters
(
<mode-args>) are required to determine the exact behaviour.
Possible values are
- out
- meta
- stats
- count
- cgi
- discard
- topcat
- samp
- tosql
- gui
Use the
help=omode flag or see SUN/256 for more information.
- out=<out-table>
The location of the output table. This is usually a
filename to write to. If it is equal to the special value "-" (the
default) the output table will be written to standard output.
This parameter must only be given if omode has its default
value of "out".
- ofmt=<out-format>
Specifies the format in which the output table will be
written (one of the ones in SUN/256 - matching is case-insensitive and you can
use just the first few letters). If it has the special value
"
(auto)" (the default), then the output filename will be
examined to try to guess what sort of file is required usually by looking at
the extension. If it's not obvious from the filename what output format is
intended, an error will result.
This parameter must only be given if omode has its default
value of "out".
stilts(1)
If the package stilts-doc is installed, the full documentation
SUN/256 is available in HTML format:
file:///usr/share/doc/stilts-doc/sun256/index.html
STILTS version 3.1-5-debian
This is the Debian version of Stilts, which lack the support of
some file formats and network protocols. For differences see
file:///usr/share/doc/stilts/README.Debian
Mark Taylor (Bristol University)