view.query property not exposed by Bigquery API

[nicku33]

OS X 10
Python 2.7.10
Name: google-cloud Version: 0.24.0

To reproduce, make a view. In our case it was existing.
! bq show --format=json nytdata:audit_et.audit_ab_alloc_view

Note that the property view.query is present in the json:

{"kind":"bigquery#table","creationTime":"1471555852846",
...
"view":{"query":"with date_range a ... REDACTED ...",
"useLegacySql":false},"type":"VIEW","id":"nytdata:audit_et.audit_ab_alloc_view","selfLink":"https://www.googleapis.com/bigquery/v2/projects/nytdata/datasets/audit_et/tables/audit_ab_alloc_view","
...
}

But if I try to get it from the API, nothing:

from google.cloud import bigquery

project="nytdata"
dataset="audit_et"
table="audit_ab_alloc_view"

bigquery_client = bigquery.Client(project=project)
dataset_temp = bigquery_client.dataset(dataset)
t=dataset_temp.table(table)
t=dataset_temp.table(u'audit_ab_alloc_view')

t.exists()
>> True

t.view_query == None
>> True

[lukesneeringer]

@tseaver Is this something that can reasonably be done alongside #3746?

[tseaver]

@nicku33 Can you try running t.reload() and see if the view_query is populated? We don't automagically fetch the server-side properties when creating the client-side table instance.

[nicku33]

Oh wow, that worked. I suppose I assumed that
dataset_temp.table( TABLE_NAME )
did an API fetch. Did I miss something in docs ?

[tseaver]

@nicku33 I agree that the docs don't highlight it, but we explicitly avoid making back-end API calls during instance construction.

[lukesneeringer]

Something @tswast recommends elsewhere is that we make it such that the first time you do a call or property check that would require this, that we just do the .reload behind the scenes.

I am going to actually close this since that is tracked elsewhere.