Creating View and Datatypes on redshift - amazon-redshift

Question

Guessing this is straight forward but cant get it to run. The issue I am having is explicitly setting column data types in a view.
I need to do this as I will be unioning it to another table and need to match that tables datatypes.
Below is the code I have tried to run(I have tried without the sortkey aswell but still wont run)
DROP VIEW IF EXISTS testing.test_view;
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW testing.test_view;
(
channel VARCHAR(80) ENCODE zstd,
trans_date TIMESTAMP ENCODE zstd
)
SORTKEY
(
trans_date
)
AS
SELECT channel,
trans_date
from (
SELECT to_date(date,'DD-MM-YYYY') as trans_date,channel
FROM testing.plan
group by date, channel
)
group by trans_date,channel;
The error message I am getting:
An error occurred when executing the SQL command: CREATE OR REPLACE
VIEW trading.trading_squads_plan_v_test ( channel , trans_date )
AS
SELECT channel VARCHAR(80) ENCODE zstd,
trans_date TIM...
Amazon Invalid operation: syntax error at or near "VARCHAR"
Position: 106;
Is this an issue with views where you cant set datatypes? If so is there a workaround?
Thanks

Answer 1

As Jon pointed out my error was trying to set a datatype at the view level, which is not possible as its only pulling this from the table.
So I cast the values in the select call from the table:
DROP VIEW IF EXISTS testing.test_view;
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW testing.test_view;
(
channel,
trans_date,
source_region
)
AS
SELECT CAST(channel as varchar(80)),
CAST(trans_date as timestamp),
CAST(0 as varchar(80)) as source_region
from (
SELECT to_date(date,'DD-MM-YYYY') as trans_date,channel
FROM testing.plan
group by date, channel
)
group by trans_date,channel;