As well as being able to load tables from external data streams, STILTS offers a way to specify tables that do not correspond to a stream of bytes. These may be defined programmatically or interact with external services in some way that is not as straightforward as decoding a stream of bytes.
Such tables are defined using different schemes,
and scheme specifications may be used in the same places as
input table names, for instance as the value of the in
parameter in tpipe and other commands.
If an input location parameter (in) uses a scheme specification,
the corresponding input format parameter (ifmt) is ignored.
The form of a scheme specification is:
:<scheme-name>:<scheme-specific-part>so that for instance "
in=:loop:10" specifies
a 10-row single-column table,
as described by the loop scheme documentation
below.
For an example of using such tables, you can try running for instance
stilts plot2plane in=:attractor:1e7,clifford layer1=mark shading1=density densemap1=plasma x1=x y1=y
The following subsections describe all the schemes that are
available by default.
It is also possible to add new schemes at runtime by using the
startable.schemes system property.