Progress Software KBase ID # 16876
HIDDEN vs VISIBLE (The Attribute Story)
The HIDDEN and VISIBLE attributes are not simple opposites of each other.
You will want to set the HIDDEN attribute to selectively show
different aspects of your interface. In some cases, you may want to hide some fields from some users. In other cases you may want to hide a screen while you programmatically manipulate its contents.
The reason that HIDDEN should be used is that VISIBLE has side
effects. VISIBLE was added to thePROGRESS 4GL in Version 7 to
parallel the behavior of the keyword VIEW.
Both VIEW and VISIBLE, when applied to an object, implicitly make
other objects visible. If you view a button, the frame that contains it and the window that contains the frame are also made visible.
[snip]
When you are setting up the contents of a frame, you want to control the timing of when that frame is made visible to your users. You do not want the frame to appear before it is ready to be seen. If you use the VISIBLE attribute on objects in the frame, there is a chance that the frame will appear before all your setup code has executed.
Because of these reasons, it is always safer to set the HIDDEN
attribute.
