Thank you very much for all your comments. I thought about including all the columns in my view and then selecting just what I need, but that is almost as painful as repeating the view's query in adding the filters I want. Modifying both the select clause and the WHERE clause of the query is twice the work. You see, I use the view to quickly review the contents of multiple tables and whether they make sense, and adding these extraneous, unformatted columns just makes the work harder, that is why I did not just throw every column into the view.
I am familiar with CTE's, but I am not sure how they would help in this situation. I guess I could throw everything into my view and use that as a CTE in a select, but all I have is that one complicated view, so creating a CTE out of it seems like wasted effort. I am intrigued by Dominique's suggestion of virtual tables and their hidden column feature. Enabling hidden columns in views would be the best of both worlds - allow me to display exactly what I want while allowing me to filter and sort on other columns. Why don't normal tables and views have hidden columns? That would be an excellent enhancement to SQLite, I think. In the meantime, copying the view's definition as a query and adding the filtering and sorting clauses to the query gets me there. It is a little bit of work, but keeps my formatting so that I can scan each row quickly and verify the data (which is the primary aim of my view). Balaji Ramanathan
