postgres question: Views with duplicate field names

From: Ryan Murphy <ryanfmurphy(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: postgres question: Views with duplicate field names
Date: 2016-09-05 19:55:21
Message-ID: CAHeEsBcraekb-+KKOftn1svvwrSsa4_hYOaYSqz2+6jo+GiyPw@mail.gmail.com
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Hello, I have a question about views in Postgres.

Given a table like so:

create table todo (
id serial,
task text,
done_time timestamp default null
);

it is legal (though perhaps not advised, by some) to query it like so:

select task, * from todo;

This gives a result with 2 redundant "task" fields (with duplicate names):

task | id | task | done_time
--------------+----+--------------+-----------
wash the dog | 1 | wash the dog |

However, if I try to make a view of this I hit a problem: views can't have
duplicate field names:

create view task2 as select task, * from todo;

ERROR: column "task" specified more than once

I understand this may seem like a silly thing to want to do, but my
question is if there is an easy way to automatically de-dup the columns of
the query so I can create a view from it. Or is there any fundamental
reason why views can't be allowed to have duplicate columns, just like the
result set above?

Thanks!

Ryan

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