ENH: Handling optional SSA query parameters is missing

[bsipocz]

I'm in the process of adding some convenience functionality into astroquery to do SSA queries for IRSA. Our serverside SSA implementation support the following parameters, however many of these are not being handled by pyvo, so at the moment I can only ignore them (even though some of the same parameters are handled by pyvo's SIA:

    POS
    SIZE
    BAND
    TIME
    COLLECTION
    RESPONSEFORMAT
    FORMAT
    SPECRP
    PUBDID
    TARGETNAME
    TIMERES

Ideally we should be able to handle all parameters in thethe recommended and optional list in 4.1.2 of the standard: https://www.ivoa.net/documents/SSA/20120210/REC-SSA-1.1-20120210.pdf

[bsipocz]

OK, so these can be passed to the query via the **keywords, yet, I would think it would be nicer to do some minimal validation like we do for SIA.

[msdemlei]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:43:05PM -0800, Brigitta Sipőcz wrote: bsipocz left a comment (astropy/pyvo#652) OK, so these can be passed to the query via the **keywords, yet, I would think it would be nicer to do some minimal validation like we do for SIA.

Absolutely, in particular because we can discover the supported optional parameters of SSAP services from the service (FORMAT=METADATA; yeah, it's a bit crazy, but SSAP... well, is SSAP). I'd say we should actually expose an API for discovering these extra query parameters.