Displaying view definitions

When you display the information for a View you will see that there are two options: View Definition and View Definition (formatted).

View definition (free-format)

In most systems, the definition of a view is held as free-format SQL text. The menu option View Definition will show you this SQL text (for some databases the text is held as a number of lines; these lines are combined for this display).

However this display often isn't very illuminating. If you are trying to understand how a view is defined you really want to know how the individual view columns are defined. View Definition (formatted) is an attempt to provide you with this information.

View definition (formatted)

When you select View Definition (formatted), AQT will get the view's SQL text then try and interpret it. It will decompose the SQL text into the individual columns then match this up with the view columns.

• The result is presented in a two-column grid with the view-column (on the left) and the source of that column beside it on the right.
• In addition, the WHERE clause is broken into components and displayed over several lines.

To demonstrate the use of this feature, run it against some of the system views.

Warning: This function works well for most of the views we have run it against. However there are limits to what it can do; if you have a particularly complex view then this display could fail or look quite strange.