Re: Adding a column to a VIEW which has dependent objects.

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Tom Lane wrote:

> Rajesh Kumar Mallah <mallah@trade-india.com> writes:
> > How do people extend a parent view which has
> > lot of dependent views?
> > The parent view cannot be dropped because that will
> > require recreating a dozen of dependent views.
> 
> You're out of luck, you'll have to drop and remake them all.
> In future we could think about some kind of ALTER VIEW ADD COLUMN
> operation, but it ain't there now.
> 
> (I suppose if you were really desperate you could think about manually
> hacking the system catalogs, but this would be pretty risky on a
> production database.)
> 
> > Also is there an easy way of dumping the definitions
> > of all the dependent views of a given object.
> 
> You can chase the links in pg_depend to see what the dependent objects
> are, but extracting their definitions would be a tad harder ...

Note that the definitions for views are stored in pg_views as well.