Display of empty data fields in views

[Rick Wherley]

I have a couple of old web2py apps that I finally updated to the current 2.22.3 version (from  a 2016 version!) and it went amazingly smoothly. Now that I've got the minor aesthetic issues cleaned up, I've discovered an issue on how data in empty fields displays, both in my own views as well as in appadmin.html.

Previously, if a field in a table had no data, it displayed as blank, which is both expected and preferred, so I'll call this "normal."

Now, if I display an existing record in a view, it still appears "normal." But if I create a new record, or if I update an existing record, any field that is empty now displays "None".

However, if I return to an editing form view, the empty fields are still blank.

My knowledge of how web2py decides to display data is so shallow that I don't have any idea where to begin to sort this out, so I can return to "normal" views. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Rick