A.5 Load Window

Load Window

Load Window

The Load Window is used for loading tables from an external location (e.g. disk or URL) into TOPCAT. It is obtained using the Load Table button () in the Control Window toolbar or File menu.

This dialogue allows you to specify a new table to open in several different ways, described below. If you successfully load a table using any of these options, a new entry will be added into the Table List in the Control Window, which you can then use in the usual ways. If you choose a location which can't be turned into a table (for instance because the file doesn't exist), a window will pop up telling you what went wrong. If you get an OutOfMemoryError while loading a table, you will have to run TOPCAT with more memory, as described in Section 9.2.2 or use the -disk flag described in Section 9.1.

In the simplest case, you can type a name into the Location field and hit return or the OK button. This location can be a filename or a URL, possibly followed by a '#' character and a 'fragment identifier' to indicate where in the file or URL the table is located; the details of what such fragment identifiers mean can be found in the relevant subsection within Section 4.1. You should select the relevant table format from the Format selector box - you can leave it on (auto) for loading FITS tables or VOTables, but for other formats such as ASCII or CSV you must select the right one explicitly (again, see Section 4.1 for details).

There are many other ways of loading tables however, described in the following subsections. The Filestore Browser button is always visible below the location field. Depending on startup options, there may be other buttons here. In any case, you can look in the DataSources menu to see other table load dialogues. Exactly which ones are available will depend on your setup (some may be absent or greyed out, and additional ones may be available). The following subsections describe some of the options which may be available.