>>However your best suggestion is to 'use macro expansion for individual clauses in SELECT, rather than for the whole thing'.
>>I had macro expanded the whole statement to allow for statements like :
>

>if not empty(cJoinCondition)
>  cSQL = cSQl + cJoinCondition
>endif
>

but I can work around this.
>Thank you verey much for your help.

Just for the record here is what I came up with:

*** ClassLib BaseApp : class LocalView : Method CreateSQL
#INCLUDE IT.H
local ;
	cViewName,;
	cFieldSection,;
	cJoinSection,;
	cSelectSQL,;
	cParentTable

this.cDoing = "Creating View : " + proper(this.cViewName)
*** following suggusted by Al Doman UT #018083
*** previously built a single macro expansion 
cParentTable  = this.cParentTable
cViewName     = this.cViewName
cFieldSection = this.cFieldSection
cJoinSection  = this.cJoinSection
cSelectSQL    = iif(empty(this.cSelectSQL),""," where " + this.cSelectSQL)
cOrderBy      = iif(empty(this.cOrderBy),""," order by " + this.cOrderBy)

Create SQL view &cViewName ;
	as select &cFieldSection ;
	from &cParentTable ;
	&cJoinSection ;
	&cSelectSQL ;
	&cOrderBy

*** Class Error Method puts error message in this.cDoing
return this.cDoing = "Creating View : " + this.cViewName

Once again I thank Al & Nancy for their help