Something I noticed in passing...

[David H.]

Running FGL v2.11.02 on Windows. If you have an EDIT set to INVISIBLE but your INPUT statement happens to have an attribute of BLACK, then the EDIT field data s displayed as its entered! If BLACK is removed then the EDIT field works as expected... Regardless of whether BLACK is provided, the INVISIBLE field data is DISPLAYed correctly.

[Sebastien F.]

Note that with Informix 4gl (in TUI mode), a color attribute of the dialog overwrites the INVISIBLE attribute in form.
Try this (uses RED because BLACK fails with c4gl):

database formonly
screen
{
[f1                            ]
}
end
attributes
f1 = formonly.field1, INVISIBLE;
end

main
   define field1 varchar(10)
   open form f1 from "f1"
   display form f1
   input by name field1
   input by name field1 attribute(red)
end main

[David H.]

I'm not sure if you are saying thats a bug or a backwards compatibility 'feature'... For me its a bug, invisible text should never be visible! I was using the windows client BTW (fglgui=1).

[Sebastien F.]

With this example, I just try to show that this behavior comes from Informix 4gl.
If we change it we may have others complain that we are not more compatible to Informix 4gl...
As a workaround, if your application is GUI only, I would suggest to use only (static) form field attributes and remove the color attributes set by dialogs in the 4gl program. You can change the style of fields dynamically if needed with ui.Form.setElementStyle().