TL/DR: as of SQL Developer 22.2, comments on views are not shown on the view editor; adding them to the Details tab would be a welcome addition.
And, as of SQLcl 22.2, the info and info+ commands don't display comments on views either, so that should be added to both, too.
Reason: comments are useful for documenting the physical model.
I'd argue that comments may be even more important on views than they are on tables; yet SQL Developer has never put table comments in good light to begin with—they appear in the very last position on the Details tab of the table editor. And comments on views have simply been entirely omitted.
BTW, did anyone complain?
Please note: here we're not talking about comments on view columns, which have always been displayed on the Columns tab. What is—has always been—omitted is the comments on the view object itself.
Comments on views have been there since Oracle 7 if not earlier, but the statement for creating them is obscuring that fact a little, as it still reads as:
COMMENT ON TABLE schema_name.view_name is 'string';
Yes, it looks like we're creating a comment on a table... Truth is, if you glance at the syntax diagram—pictured below, from the 19c SQL Reference manual—too quickly, you might even get to the erroneous belief that comments on views are unsupported.
(But hey, tables and views are in the same namespace, right? and a comment is a comment, right? So why should Oracle developers have wasted time on syntactic sugar?)
Yet comments on views deserve a prominent place, in line with their importance as a mean of documenting the data model—not in the last position on the Details tab, please!
While you're at it, please consider revisiting the order of columns on the Details tab, to make it more relevant. For that you'll have to change the query a little bit, which as of now reads as follows:
select o.created, o.last_ddl_time, v.*, o.duplicated, o.sharded
from (
select owner, object_name, created, last_ddl_time, duplicated, sharded
from sys.Dba_objects
where object_name = :OBJECT_NAME
and owner = :OBJECT_OWNER
) o,
(
select *
from Dba_views
where owner = :OBJECT_OWNER
and view_name = :OBJECT_NAME
) v
where o.owner = v.owner
and v.view_name = o.object_name
(Note: reformatted for reader's convenience.)
The problem with this query is that v.* specification in the top-level SELECT-list, combined with the (select * from Dba_views ...) v subquery; ultimately that results in columns from DBA_VIEWS / ALL_VIEWS being displayed in exactly the same order as they appear in the view definition in the data dictionary, and that order is neither very logical, nor as easy to use as it should be—and it is not meant to be: it's up to users and tools designers to improve on that to do as they see fit. Further, the above SELECT-list also results in columns from DBA_OBJECTS / ALL_OBJECTS to appear either in the first or in the last positions, which doesn't make much sense either: CREATED and LAST_DDL_TIME are important columns indeed, but not to such an extent that they should appear before OWNER and VIEW_NAME.
In brief, compare this:
To this:
Yes, I know I can do this myself by creating an individual XML extension (link to Oracle-supplied examples), but wouldn't it be great if that came out-of-the-box?
Same goes for the info and info+ commands in SQL Developer and SQLcl. Here's the readout of info as of SQLcl 22.2.1:
info doesn't show more than view columns, complete with comments.
Here's the readout of info+:
info+ drops column-level comments in favor of column-level statistics... which happen not to exist on views as far as I'm aware, so actually here info+ shows less information than info itself; we'd expect both commands to show a lot more, with view comments in a prominent position to begin with.
Again, working around this by creating my own script + a command alias would not be terribly difficult, but this post is all about what comes with the product out-of-the-box.
Thanks & Regards,