Any way to change Phppgadmin view order of columns without changing underlying db

Question

Hey everyone,

Is there any way to change the order of the columns phppgadmin views when browsing tables without having to change the underlying db?

I have a few columns that I want seperated by heaps of unimportant ones and then a few more important ones at the end. The problem is that the important ones on the right are way of the screen so its hard to check visually if data has been inputed correctly.

Cheers

Answer 1

I know little about Phppgadmin, but I think that you can't do that - customize the order in which the columns are displayed- it's determined by the DB schema.

And, even if you wanted to do that in the underlying db, it would be not easy, Postgresql does not support column reordering: you would need to dump-edit-restore the table, or do a SELECT ... INTO ... followed by a RENAME and DROP TABLE; but you would need to fix manually dependecies in this case (views, FK, sequences, etc).

It's true that the column order in a database has little relevance from the pure relational point of view, but in practical use it's nice to have related fields together, it helps when browsing.

One alternative (probably unsastifactory) is to define a VIEW which mirrors a table, with the columns reordered, and use that for browsing. It would not be useful for updating, though... among other shortcomings.