What is the purpose of the METS Generator in Dspace? How does it get called, and for what purpose exactly? Is there any docs that explain properly its role ? I'm trying to figure out its original intent
DspaceMETSGenerator is the DSpace XMLUI class that prepares the data of an Item,Community,Collection for transformation into html from an intermediary format named METS hence the name DSpaceMETSGenerator. You can see the raw METS of an item by going to [dspace.url]/metadata/handle/[handle-prefix]/[handle-suffix]/mets.xml
The heavy lifting of the transformation from database objects to mets.xml is delegated to subclasses of org.dspace.app.xmlui.objectmanager.AbstractAdapter e.g. org.dspace.app.xmlui.objectmanager.ItemAdapter. DSpaceMETSGenerator decides which adapter to delegate to and applies the necessary configuration to it.