For I needed to convert a felis model to an empty astropy VOTable instance with populated metadata. This was relatively straightforward but it seemed like it was something that might be needed in general and so should be in felis itself.

It’s not completely straightforward in that:

1. A user might only require a subset of all the available fields so should be able to specify that subset.

2. A user might want additional non-standard fields.

3. A user might want to specify the order of the columns in the table.

For option two it might be sufficient to document how fields can be added to the returned VOTable, but accepting additional astropy.io.votable.tree.Field instances is probably a better option.

I’m not sure what happens in scenarios where the model corresponds to multiple tables in the VOTable.