Description:
It would be nice to be able to visualize the sources of the various columns of views, particularly for users working with view-heavy databases. For example, in the database with which I work, a large, multi-level hierarchy of views is used to aggregate data in various sequences of steps, with most views calculating only a few of their columns and merely echoing the rest from the view below. Altering the hierarchy to achieve a particular analysis would be greatly eased if it could be visualized, but this currently can't be done with Workbench.
How to repeat:
Add to an EER diagram a view and one or more tables or views from which it selects.
Suggested fix:
First, implement http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=51498, showing view columns in EER diagrams in the first place. Then, go a step further and show the (direct) dependencies of views on tables and other views using directed lines similar to the ones used to show foreign key relationships. (By the 'dependencies' of a view column I mean the column(s) appearing in the expression for that column in the view's SELECT clause.) Also as is already the case for foreign keys, whether the connections were drawn between individual columns or their containing entities should be configurable, though entity-level display may be helpful less frequently for these relationships than for FKs. At some point in the future, variation or annotation of the lines might be used to convey more information about some aspect of the dependencies.
If there's concern about this info being too voluminous and distracting in some use cases, please simply make its display optional.
