Re: Adding \ev view editor?

Tom Lane wrote:
> It might be worth pointing out that what I don't want pg_dump doing
> is suppressing "useless" parentheses. Adding whitespace ought to be
> safe enough. So if anyone wanted to do the work of decoupling those
> two effects of the prettyprint option, we could have "semi pretty
> printed" output in pg_dump. Dunno if it's worth it.
>
>
>

The attached patch goes part of the way towards doing this, by adding
white space unconditionally to the target list of a viewdef.

The nice thing about that is that it's the part of a viewdef which
basically isn't pretty-printed now, even if you ask for pretty printing.
That would certainly
make editing the view with a \ev command a lot nicer.

Along the way it suppresses putting a newline before a CASE expression
in pretty printing mode, which seems to be an odd thing to do and is
inconsistent with the way other expressions are treated.

Sample output:

andrew=# select pg_get_viewdef('foo',true);
pg_get_viewdef
------------------------------
SELECT 'a'::text AS b,
( SELECT 1
FROM dual) AS x,
random() AS y,
CASE
WHEN true THEN 1
ELSE 0
END AS c,
1 AS d
FROM dual;
(1 row)

cheers

andrew