逆向工程视图

Question

I was asked how to reverse engineer a view so it can be determined what columns and table were used in the sql query to produce the view . So say view 1 was constructed from the following 10 tables and 43 columns . Is this even possible in sql server 2005 ?

Answer 1

Use sp_helptext

exec sp_helptext 'your_view'

Edit

What you want is to find out what dependencies your view has. You can use sp_depends to do that, but it will only get you the table dependencies and not the columns.

exec sp_depends 'your_view'

In order to find out the columns you will probably have to code some kind of SQL parser to extract the columns being used from the Create View statement you recovered with sp_helptext.

You can try using a ReGex to extract the info you want or if you want a big and fancier gun you can try Irony which has a built in Sql Lexic.

Answer 2

Yes, in SSMS choose your database -> views -> right click -> script as CREATE .

If you want to decode a view on another database, you have no access to (eg interface) - than this is not possible.