Class lsst::afw::table::BaseTable

class BaseTable : public std::enable_shared_from_this<BaseTable>

Base class for all tables.

Tables have two largely distinct purposes:

• They serve as factories for records, allocating their field data in blocks.

• They carry additional information (such as the schema) that should be shared by multiple records.

It’s mostly a matter of convenience that we use the same class to serve both needs.

Tables do not actually maintain a list of all the records they have allocated - but those records hold a pointer back to the table. This allows the work of holding and iterating over records to be delegated to templated container classes (such as CatalogT) while allowing tables to be polymorphic, non-template classes. In some sense, then, it may make more sense to think of a table as a combination factory and “container header”.

Tables are always created in shared_ptrs (a requirement of enable_shared_from_this). BaseTable provides a make static member function to create a new table, and most derived table classes should do the same.

Each table class should be associated with a particular record class (1-to-1). Each table instance may be associated with many record instances.

Subclassed by lsst::afw::detection::PeakTable, lsst::afw::table::ExposureTable, lsst::afw::table::SimpleTable