Partial updates

[antonio]

I want to use views to fake user tables in several web applications. So I'd want to partial update just some fields of the view.

Imagine I have the following tables:

users
+----+-------+------+-----------------+
| id | login | name | organization_id |
+----+-------+------+-----------------+

organizations
+----+------+------------+
| id | name | maildomain |
+----+------+------------+

webapp_options
+---------+-----------------
| user_id | many_options...
+---------+-----------------

I create the following view, in order to fake the web application users table:

CREATE VIEW fake_users AS SELECT users.id AS id, users.name AS name, CONCAT(users.login, '@', organizations.maildomain) AS email, app_options.many_options AS many_options WHERE users.id = app_options.user_id AND users.organization_id = organizations.id;

An update on fake_users would work if `email` field is identical, changing app_options. But it would fail if the user tries to change his email, because it is fixed.

What do you think about this idea?