STILTS-REGQUERY(1)

NAME
stilts-regquery - Queries the VO registry

SYNOPSIS

stilts regquery [query=<value>] [regurl=<url-value>] [soapout=<out-file>] [ocmd=<cmds>] [omode=out|meta|stats|count|checksum|cgi|discard|topcat|samp|tosql|gui] [out=<out-table>] [ofmt=<out-format>]

DESCRIPTION

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.

OPTIONS

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.

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

        *   https://registry.euro-vo.org/services/RegistrySearch

        *   https://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 alternatively 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. A backslash character '\fR' at the end of a line joins it with the following line.

omode=out|meta|stats|count|checksum|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

        *   checksum

        *   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".

SEE ALSO
stilts(1)

If the package stilts-doc is installed, the full documentation SUN/256 is available in HTML format:
file:///usr/share/doc/stilts/sun256/index.html

VERSION
STILTS version 3.5.4-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

AUTHOR
Mark Taylor (Bristol University)