I realize now that due to the nature of the fields I'm using to create the compound index I'm not going to get it to sort properly. The first is an integer, the second a date. If I convert them to strings in order to concatenate them, the dates won't sort correctly: "05/01/2000" comes before "06/01/1999". So I'm reluctantly going back to using a view.

Thanks for everyone's help,
Menachem