• T: Report type, one of E(rror), W(arning), I(nfo), S(ummary), F(ailure). See the documentation of the report parameter for further description of what these mean. The report parameter can be used to suppress some of these; only E indicates actual service compliance errors, but including the others may make it easier to see what's going on.
• SSS: Stage abbreviation, as used in the stages parameter. The stages parameter can be used to select which stages are run.
• MMMM: Message label, which is always the same for messages generated by the same test, is usually different for messages generated by different tests, and may be somewhat mnemonic.
• x: Continuation indicator, either "-" or "+". In most cases it is "-", indicating the first line of a message, but multi-line messages (rare) use "-" for the first line and "+" for any continuation lines.
• N: Sequence number, which is 1 for the first time message T-SSS-MMMM is reported, and increases by one for each subsequent appearance. After a certain maximum (determined by the maxrepeat parameter) additional reports with the same code are no longer output individually, but a summary of the number of reports so discarded is written at the end of the section with the character "x" instead of the sequence number. This behaviour prevents the output being swamped by multiple reports of the same issue. If the maxrepeat parameter is increased above 9, more than one digit will be used here (so e.g. for maxrepeat=999, the format would be NNN not N).
• aaaaa...: Message text, a free text description of what is being reported.

The base URL of a Table Access Protocol service. This is the bare URL without a trailing "/[a]sync".

In the usual case, the default values of the various endpoints (sync and async query submission, tables metadata, service-provided examples etc) use this URL as a parent and append standard sub-paths.

In some cases however, determination of the endpoints is more complicated, as determined by the interface parameter which may cause endpoints to be read from the capabilities document at tapurl/capabilities, and by other endpoint-specific parameters (syncurl, asyncurl, tablesurl, capabilitiesurl, availabilityurl, examplesurl) for fine tuning.

Determines the validation stages which the validator will peform. Each stage is represented by a short code, as follows:

This parameter can specify what stages to run in the following ways:

So "TME CAP" will run only Table Metadata and Capability stages, while "-EXA -UPL" will run all the default stages apart from Examples and Upload. The order in which stages are listed is not significant.

Note that removing some stages may affect the operation of others; for instance table metadata is acquired from the metadata stages, and avoiding those will mean that later stages which use the table metadata to pose queries will not be able to do so with knowledge of the database schema.

Limits the number of tables from the service that will be tested. Currently, this only affects stage MDQ. If the value is left blank (the default), or if it is larger than the number of tables actually present in the service, it will have no effect.

If supplied, this specifies a list of tables to test. It may be set to a space- or comma-separated list of table names for consideration; any tables not covered by this list are mostly ignored for the purposes of reporting. Matching against table names is case-insensitive, and the asterisk character "*" may be used as a wildcard to match any sequence of characters. Note that matching is against the declared table name which may or may not include a schema name prefix depending on service behaviour.

By default this parameter is not set, which means that all tables are considered.

Determines the format of the output. Possible values are text, json.

Note not all of the other parameters may be applicable to all output formats.

Letters indicating which message types should be listed. Each character of the string is one of the letters E, W, I, S, F with the following meanings:

Puts a limit on the number of times that a single message will be repeated. By setting this to some reasonably small number, you can ensure that the output does not get cluttered up by millions of repetitions of essentially the same error.

Limits the line length written to the output.

If true, debugging output including stack traces will be output along with the normal validation messages.

Defines how the service endpoints and the version of the TAP protocol to use for queries is determined. This may take one of the following (case-insensitive) values:

The capabilities document, if used, is read from tapurl/capabilities unless the capabilitiesurl parameter is defined, in which case that is used.

The baseline value of all the TAP service endpoints (sync, async, tables, capabilities, examples) are determined by this parameter, but each of those endpoint values may be overridden individually by other endpoint-specific parameters (syncurl, asyncurl, tablesurl, capabilitiesurl, availabilityurl, examplesurl)

For default (unauthenticated) access, the default value is usually suitable.

Sets the URL to use for the sync endpoint of the TAP service. The default value would be <tapurl>/sync, but it may be influenced by the chosen interface value, and it can be further overridden by setting this value.

Sets the URL to use for the async endpoint of the TAP service. The default value would be <tapurl>/async, but it may be influenced by the chosen interface value, and it can be further overridden by setting this value.

Sets the URL to use for the tables endpoint of the TAP service. The default value would be <tapurl>/tables, but it may be influenced by the chosen interface value, and it can be further overridden by setting this value.

Sets the URL to use for the capabilities endpoint of the TAP service. The default value would be <tapurl>/capabilities, but it may be influenced by the chosen interface value, and it can be further overridden by setting this value.

Sets the URL to use for the availability endpoint of the TAP service. The default value would be <tapurl>/availability, but it may be influenced by the chosen interface value, and it can be further overridden by setting this value.

Sets the URL to use for the examples endpoint of the TAP service. The default value would be <tapurl>/examples, but it may be influenced by the chosen interface value, and it can be further overridden by setting this value.