ENH: methods to return astropy Tables rather than VO specific tables

[bsipocz]

E.g. Irsa.list_catalogs(full=True)or Irsa.query_sia() currenlty returns a DALResultsTable as well as e.g. Alma.query_tap also returns a DALResultsTable.

I don't think this is useful for the astroquery users, and thus propose to add the to_table() or to_qtable() in the astroquery code and thus return astropy Table or QTable, out of the box.

What do you think @keflavich and @andamian

If the VO output is thought to be useful, then we can still provide access to it by an opt-in kwarg instead of returning it by default for everything.

[keflavich]

I agree, tables please, not VO objects! But yes, make access to VO objects possible via keyword.

[andamian]

Yes. I agree with tables.
I'm trying to remember what was my rationale in Alma.query_tap. The only thing that I can think of is the warnings that are included in the DALResponse but not in the table. The most obvious one is partial/truncated results. Can you think of conveying that message? A warning maybe? The other one was probably the units but to_qtable() takes care of that now (it wasn't available back then).

[bsipocz]

Yes, we can certainly go with to_qtable().

But I'm not sure what you mean by the warnings are not included in the Table case. We still receive them as DALResponse, just add the to_qtable in astroquery, so the warnings should come straight through or we can make sure they are not getting filtered out.

[andamian]

OK. You are right. DALResponse issues those warnings as it reads the result so no need to worry about that.