Find view item's oraginal column in table

Question

Hi
I need to find out a column in view original column in its parent table in my SQL program.
I know I can call
select dbms_metadata.get_ddl('VIEW','V_EMP','SCOTT') from dual;
Then I get DDL of this view
CREATE OR REPLACE FORCE VIEW "SCOTT"."V_EMP" ("E_ROWID", "D_ROWID", "DEPTNO",
"DNAME", "ENAME") AS
SELECT e.rowid e_rowid,d.Rowid d_rowid, d.deptno,d.dname,e.ename
FROM dept d JOIN emp e ON (d.deptno=e.deptno)
Does anyone know other simple way?
Thanks first!
zz

Answer 1

If the goal is to determine that the DNAME column of V_EMP comes from the DNAME column of the DEPT table, you're probably out of luck. Unless you care to write a SQL parser (which you really, really, really don't want to do), there is no way to get this information-- Oracle certainly doesn't keep track. In general, Oracle cannot track that information for a variety of reasons-- including the fact that columns in a view may be derived from multiple columns in multiple tables, from columns in other views, from columns in inline views, from function calls that may themselves depend on dozens of columns in different tables, etc.
Justin