RE: VOTable Questions

From: Alex Szalay <szalay-at-jhu.edu>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 07:52:57 -0400


It should ONLY be an optional keyword, since many of the current VOTable generators work off of a query, where you do not know in the beginning, how many rows the table has in the end.

Thus, one cannot write a VOTable on a stream, if we make this part of the mandatory spec, it has to be buffered first on the server side, a serious impediment.

Cheers, Alex

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-votable-at-eso.org [mailto:owner-votable-at-eso.org]On Behalf Of Alasdair Allan
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2003 7:07 AM To: Randall Thompson
Cc: votable-at-ivoa.net
Subject: Re: VOTable Questions

> 1) We did not see any way to describe (in a machine-readable

> form) the number of rows found from a query, or the
> number of rows returned...

This is actually something I'd find useful too, it would save you having to parse the entire table just to find out how big it was, and I don't think there is a standard way of doing it, although I might have overlooked one?

It seems like something people would want to do, so if there isn't already a way to do it, maybe an _optional_ attribute to TABLEDATA like...

  <DATA>
    <TABLEDATA ROWS="2344">      

...would be the way to go? Any support? Disagreement? Or just no interest?

Al.

-- 
Dr. A. Allan, School of Physics, University of Exeter
Received on 2003-10-23Z13:56:48