Re: Preserving the source code of views

Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:10:04 +1300



    On 20/10/13 16:38, Brian Crowell wrote:

    
      Hello! I'm evaluating PostgreSQL as a replacement
        for SQL Server in our in-house systems. I've been really
        impressed with it so far, and I'm eager to try it with our data
        sets.
        

          I've run across one thing that would make a transfer
          difficult. Postgres doesn't preserve the source code for
          views, as far as I can tell. It parses them and then prints
          them its own way. We have a lot of complicated views, where
          both the formatting and the comments are significant. In fact,
          we produce some of our system documentation directly from the
          comments.
        

        Is there currently a way to preserve the original source
          code of a view as entered in the CREATE VIEW statement?
        

        --Brian
      
    
    The 'Real Experts' may well have more practically elegant solutions,
    but a couple possibilities I can think of are as follows:

    
      You have access to the source of PostgreSQL, so you could
        modify the source code to preserve the source code of the views.

        
      This might be able to be done using the extension mechanism,
        but I have not looked into that myself.
    
    
    So yes, you can do what you want, but not necessarily as easily as
    you would like.

    
    Cheers,

    Gavin