Creating Views with Column Names based on Distinct Row Data

Hi All,

(I'm sure I'm not the first person to want to do this, but I didn't see any
mention of it in the FAQ or developers FAQ nor in the docs - if I've missed
something, a gentle pointer will be fine :)

I was wondering if it is possible to create a table view based on a table
which is effectively an "attribute list".

For example, suppose I have two tables:

CREATE TABLE user
(
userid integer,
username character varying,
userpassword character varying,
startdate date
);

CREATE TABLE userdetail
(
userid integer,
attributename character varying,
attributevalue character varying
);

"user" holds pre-defined details about a user (things which are common to all
users).

"userdetail" holds (name,value) pairs about users.

Now I want to make a public view of the user, which would have all of the
defined fields in user, and all of the defined attributes across userdetail.

(e.g. suppose we have 2 types of user - typeA has attributes x, y, z and typeB
has attributes a, b. Then I'd want my public view to look like):

CREATE TABLE PvUser
(
userid integer,
username character varying,
userpassword character varying,
startdate date,
x character varying,
y character varying,
z character varying,
a character varying,
b character varying
);

It is possible to do this (i.e. have the public view created by specifying the
column names "AS" the distinct value of a column in rows in another table?

CREATE VIEW PvUser AS
SELECT
u.userid
u.username
u.password
u.startdate
-- For each unique attributename in userdetail
ud.attributevalue AS {Value of ud.attributename}
FROM
user u, userdetail ud
;

Is what I'm trying to do feasible?

Thanks for any and all help,

Damien