bcquality/community/knowledge/performance/case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.bad.al
António Silva 0d5150c47b Drop the parentheses from the case false of value sets
Applies NKarolak's review suggestion: a case value set needs no parentheses
around a comparison.

Encodes the rationale in the Best Practice section, since it is a real
advantage of the pattern and is not documented elsewhere in the repo. The AL
operator hierarchy places and/xor above the comparison operators and or just
above them too, so parentheses are mandatory in an and chain — A = B and
C = D misparses without them — while a case value set has no and to bind
tighter and needs none. That inverts the precedence most developers arrive
with from C#.

Also notes in the bad sample that its parentheses are not optional, so the
two samples contrast on parentheses as well as on evaluation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-27 10:31:00 +01:00

29 lines
1.2 KiB
AL

codeunit 50543 "Perf Sample CaseChain Bad"
{
procedure IsShippableLine(SalesLine: Record "Sales Line"): Boolean
var
Item: Record Item;
begin
// Five levels of nesting to sequence five guards. The evaluation order is
// carried by indentation alone and the body drifts steadily right.
if SalesLine.Type = SalesLine.Type::Item then
if SalesLine."No." <> '' then
if SalesLine."Qty. to Ship" > 0 then
if Item.Get(SalesLine."No.") then
if not Item.Blocked then
exit(true);
exit(false);
end;
procedure IsShippableLineCollapsed(SalesLine: Record "Sales Line"): Boolean
var
Item: Record Item;
begin
// The wrong escape from the ladder: flattening it into 'and' trades the
// nesting for a defect, because every operand is still evaluated. Item
// fields are read even when the Get failed. The parentheses are not
// optional either — 'and' binds tighter than '=' and '<>' in AL.
exit((SalesLine.Type = SalesLine.Type::Item) and (SalesLine."No." <> '') and
(SalesLine."Qty. to Ship" > 0) and Item.Get(SalesLine."No.") and (not Item.Blocked));
end;
}