flatterer integration

[jpmckinney]

I have a local repository (spoonbill-ng) that I last touched in February 2022, to try to use flatterer purely for flattening, while keeping the other high-level features of Spoonbill. It has a NOTES.txt file with the remaining code to read/review for integration.

Another option is to store some of the metadata files created by Flatterer, when the Data Registry converts the JSON to Excel and CSV. Those metadata files can then be used to do basic table customizations in spoonbill-web like: decide which tables and columns to include, and how to rename the headings. With this approach, the "shape" of the tables is unchanged.

If we want to offer other shapes (like combining documents into one sheet) we can do that by editing (pre-processing) the JSON (would need to add our own _link columns?). In terms of pre-processing, I think we can’t implement "roll-up multiple" easily (unless we name JSON fields like "fieldname/0"?). I tagged some issues that involve pre-processing the data before it’s flattened.

See also this Slack thread. Some notes:

• For translated field titles as column headings, we just need to provide an extended and translated schema to Flatterer.