> Not that I know of. At some stage,Firebird is obviously inserting the
> rows into the underlying table, but this appears to be transparent to
> ODBC. This is as it should be IMHO - a view whose joins do not make it
> impossible to insert should behave just like a table as far as the
> client knows. That is, I should be able to expose a view without
> clients knowing where its fields came from, so that I can change the
> underlying table structure as I please.
>

making a view updatable requires that you follow some key points (check the
programmers guide on Views).
Joins of any sort make a view read-only - end of story (unless you use
cutom, separate SQL on the underlying tables)
You can change the underlying table structure of any table as you please but
any change which violates the views requirements will be denied by the
server. Valid update/insert statements for an updatable view will also be
valid for the table.

Alan