Informix Error -4490: You cannot have multiple BEFORE clauses for the same field.

Reasons / Common Causes

-4490 fires when a field has more than one BEFORE FIELD clause — per the official guidance, only one is permitted per field.

1. More than one BEFORE clause specified for the same field, per the official guidance — the direct, only cause.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Combine the statements from all BEFORE clauses for the field into a single one.

Examples

Duplicate BEFORE clauses for one field

INPUT BY NAME rec.*
  BEFORE FIELD order_id
    MESSAGE "Enter order number"
  BEFORE FIELD order_id
    LET order_id = 0
  -- -4490: order_id already has a BEFORE clause above
END INPUT

Corrected

INPUT BY NAME rec.*
  BEFORE FIELD order_id
    MESSAGE "Enter order number"
    LET order_id = 0
END INPUT

Diagnostic Checks

1. Check every field for more than one BEFORE clause, and combine them into one.

Related Errors / Related Topics

No closely related error codes are cross-referenced for -4490 in this set yet.

A field has more than one BEFORE clause — combine them into a single one.