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Informix Error -4653: No more than one BEFORE or AFTER INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU clause can appear in an INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU statement.

Cause and resolution

No more than one BEFORE or AFTER INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU clause can appear in an INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU statement.

There may be only one BEFORE block of statements to initialized each of these statement types. Make sure that the scope of all your INPUT, CONSTRUCT and MENU statements is correctly marked with END statements. Then combine all the preparation code into a single BEFORE block for each one.

Note: Error -4653 with this meaning is issued by 4GL after Version 4.1.

Oninit® Troubleshooting Guidance

Reasons / Common Causes

-4653 fires when an INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU statement has more than one BEFORE or AFTER clause of the matching type — per the official guidance, only one such block is allowed per statement type; issued by 4GL after Version 4.1.

  1. More than one BEFORE INPUT/BEFORE CONSTRUCT/BEFORE MENU clause, per the official guidance.
  2. More than one AFTER INPUT/AFTER CONSTRUCT/AFTER MENU clause, per the official guidance.
Solutions / Resolution
  1. Make sure the scope of all INPUT, CONSTRUCT, and MENU statements is correctly marked with END statements, per the official guidance.
  2. Combine all the preparation code into a single BEFORE block (and likewise for AFTER) for each statement, per the official guidance.
Examples
Duplicate BEFORE INPUT clauses
INPUT BY NAME rec.*
  BEFORE INPUT
    MESSAGE "Entering order"
  BEFORE INPUT
    LET status = "New"
  -- -4653: only one BEFORE INPUT is allowed
END INPUT
Corrected
INPUT BY NAME rec.*
  BEFORE INPUT
    MESSAGE "Entering order"
    LET status = "New"
END INPUT
Diagnostic Checks
  1. Check the statement's END boundary, and combine any duplicate BEFORE/AFTER clauses of the same type into one.
Related Errors / Related Topics
  • -4490 — "You cannot have multiple BEFORE clauses for the same field." A related duplicate-clause restriction, about per-field BEFORE clauses rather than statement-level BEFORE/AFTER INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU.
  • -4644 — "The HELP and ATTRIBUTE clauses each can be specified only once." A related duplicate-clause restriction, for HELP/ATTRIBUTE rather than BEFORE/AFTER.

An INPUT/CONSTRUCT/MENU statement has more than one BEFORE or AFTER clause of the same type — combine them into one.