Susannah (#402) mentioned in August 2004 with regard to trying to hide fields in Reporting Objects......

"Dear NewTo;
What version are you in? if you are in 526, its possible. if you are in 525, you need a download.
Art Greenhaus at ibi has written this routine and your salesperson or tech rep should be able to help you contact him, or get the add in file and the documentation from him for you.
What you'll get is a replacement for the ibiapplets.txt (if you're in 525), then you have to make an edit to your site.wfs
Basically, you'll specify some field name characteristics (for ALL files) that you want to exclude(hide) from Reporting OBjects, then you just make new masters, with the hidable fields named with, say, 'xxx' if thats the field characteristics you've decided to hide.
Clear as mud, i know; we all wish it were easier. But we're happy to have a workaround.
(This is for Focus Reporting Objects.)"
.....

We're running 526, but I cant see any mention of this within doc. Does anybody know if this is available? - and if it is, how it works ?
Thanks
Stuart

If this is for reporting objects only. 1 option I could think of off the top of my head that is: Is you could create a seperate MASTER FILE with only the fields that you want and use it in the reporting object. I do not think this will work for NON-RDBMS table because some of them may be positional like FIX format and they need it for positioning.

1. here's the entry in my site.wfs on client52/wfc/etc
_site_profile = \\=
\n -SET \&\&IBI_IF_FLDS = 'd:\\ibi\\apps\\excludef.fex';
2. here's the excludef.fex
WHERE NAME OMITS 'x'
WHERE NAME OMITS 'KEY'
WHERE NAME OMITS 'key'
3. all my reporting objects have been edited to have fieldnames containing these things if i want to hide them. remember you can't change the fieldname of an indexed /key field ... icky stuff happens. but i put an x in the name of any datafield i don't want to show.
Note also that this fex is not in mre but is 'on the backend', as they say (whatever that means!)
4. get your sales rep to go to art greenhaus and get the doc for this procedure. i'm in 525 and i have no idea how this works in any newer version...upgrades are peril!

Not sure if this is what Stingray was eluding to above, but found that if you blank the fieldname and alias from the mas, then Report Assistant ignores that field in the field list. So therefore i've generated a Report assist mas with descriptions and nulled out fieldnames allied with the USE command for the data.
Thanks for your comments.
Stuart

OK There is an undocumented feature. If you put 3 @ signs in the field DESCRIPTION or the HELP text of a master file WebFOCUS will ignore it for some things like Report Assist. Be careful using this. I am not sure is this is supported by IBI or no.

You must also edit the ibiapplets.txt file located in the ibi_html/javaassist directory. Look for

StringArray,FIELDS

following the lookup string above in the TABLE FILE SYSCOLUM add this where statement

WHERE (TITLE OMITS '@@@');

so every field that has @@@ in the title will no longer show up.

If you want you could use HELPMESSAGE instead of TITLE