>I believe that if you have a view that contains changes (changes to pre-existing records as well as newly added records), when you SQL SELECT from that view, what you really get is the data from the view as it was originally selected, with none of your changes. I don't have to do this too often, so I've just SCANned the view when I needed to look at "current" data, but there must be a way to get the data as it currently exists. Is there or are we just left to more "manual" approaches.

VFP9 will allow to do select from buffered data. Until that you'll have to use non-SQL commands, like SCAN or COPY TO, to do that.