Dave,
>
> AFAIK, pgadmin opens a pipe to pg_dump.
Yes, when creating an actual backup. To display the definition on the
main window it goes to great pains to reverse engineer the SQL from the
catalogues.
do you think it is possible to "isolate that pain" within the source and expose it as a module? Or do you think this would be way to difficult?
That would require significant restructuring of pgAdmin's code, in a way that would not make it more usable within pgAdmin. It's not something we would consider doing.
Regards, Dave.