Oninit Phoenix Forms: Informix Form Decompiler

Lost the source for your Informix 4GL screen forms? Oninit Phoenix Forms decompiles compiled form files (.frm) back into readable .per source. Upload a form and the tool rebuilds its screen layout, field definitions, attributes and table references, then shows the recovered .per directly on the page. There's nothing to install and nothing is stored, which makes it easier to maintain, document or migrate legacy 4GL applications when the original form source is gone.

What it recovers

Upload an Informix 4GL compiled form (.frm) file, and the tool will reverse-engineer the binary and reconstruct the original .per source definition: the screen layout (field positions and surrounding text, exactly as laid out in the original form), every field tag and its table/column binding, the TABLES section, SCREEN RECORD / SCREEN ARRAY declarations, and the ATTRIBUTES section for each field — TYPE, COMMENTS, FORMAT, PICTURE, COLOR, INCLUDE item lists, DEFAULT values, and the boolean attributes (REQUIRED, NOENTRY, UPSHIFT, DOWNSHIFT, AUTONEXT and more), plus the INSTRUCTIONS section (DELIMITERS and screen record declarations). This makes it useful for recovering a lost form, documenting legacy screens, auditing what a form actually does, or planning a migration to Genero, FourJs GAS, or a web front end when the original .per is gone.

Before and after: a decompiled form

Here is a short example, side by side: hand-written source on the left, what Phoenix Forms reconstructs from the compiled binary alone (no source) on the right. This is a small illustrative form built for this page, not a real customer form — but it was compiled with the real IBM Informix 4GL form compiler and decompiled with the real tool, and the recovered .per recompiles to a byte-identical .frm. Attribute order can canonicalize (the recovered form lists UPSHIFT before REQUIRED before COMMENTS, matching how form4gl itself orders them internally) but nothing is lost.

DATABASE formonly
SCREEN
{
Item code: [f0        ]
Qty:       [f1  ]
}
ATTRIBUTES
f0 = formonly.f0 TYPE CHAR,
     COMMENTS = "Item code",
     UPSHIFT,
     REQUIRED;
f1 = formonly.f1 TYPE INTEGER,
     DEFAULT = 1;
INSTRUCTIONS
DELIMITERS "  "

DATABASE formonly
SCREEN
{
Item code: [f0        ]
Qty:       [f1  ]
}
ATTRIBUTES
f0 = formonly.f0 TYPE CHAR, UPSHIFT, REQUIRED, COMMENTS = "Item code";
f1 = formonly.f1 TYPE INTEGER, DEFAULT = 1;
END
INSTRUCTIONS
DELIMITERS "  ";
END

Supported forms and limits

Recovery works on forms compiled by the real IBM Informix 4GL form compiler, form4gl. Uploads are limited to a single .frm file of up to 64 KiB — generous headroom, since compiled forms are normally a few hundred bytes to a few kilobytes. Single-file uploads are supported, and once processing is complete, the reconstructed .per source is rendered directly on the page for immediate review. No additional software, configuration, or manual extraction steps are required.

How we verify it

A decompiler is easy to demo and hard to trust, so recovered .per source isn't just shown — it's recompiled with the same real, unmodified form4gl and checked byte-for-byte against the original .frm. That's the same trust signal as Oninit Phoenix Recover: not merely readable, but re-compilable to an identical binary. Across a corpus of 2,262 real-world compiled Informix 4GL forms, 1,885 of 2,213 tested round-trip completely cleanly — decompiled to .per, recompiled with form4gl, and matching the original .frm byte-for-byte, a round-trip success rate of 85.18%. The remaining forms recover partially today; that count is climbing as each remaining gap is found and fixed. (Form names and source are not shown here, as the corpus is drawn from real third-party codebases, not public samples — the example above is a small form built specifically for this page.)

The decompiler runs server-side; nothing is stored. For batch or scripted use, see the ondebug CLI, which can decompile forms from the command line. Need the program logic too? See Oninit Phoenix Recover, the Informix 4GL decompiler for .4ge programs.