"Download these search results as CSV/JSON" button

Situation: use a CKAN website to do a search for datasets. You want to download the search results as a CSV so you can work through them methodically and do further analysis.

We got asked for this many times in DGU. Often by departments wanting a spreadsheet to keep track of their own datasets. I'm wondering if this is a useful feature in CKAN

Yes, we have a the package_search API. But it is not easy converting the search filters in the URL to the form needed by package_search. And that always returns JSON when plenty of people want CSV. A simple serialization should suffice for this purpose - not all the resources and every field - for that they chould use json. We could make it an option in package_search to return 'simple_csv', to hint that it is not complete.

A simple way to implement it is outlined here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52081874/1512326

Start by reviewing CKAN's package_search API, how search filters are represented in the URL, and the linked Stack Overflow serialization example. Define the scope of a simple CSV response versus the existing JSON response; done should mean an agreed implementation for the proposed export option.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.