580970ac12
Review decision: all five conditions share one action, so they share one comma-separated value set with a single exit(false). Aligns the article's Best Practice with the sample — it previously told authors to keep side-effecting conditions in their own value set, which the sample no longer does — and drops the now-contradictory wording about listing the failure action per condition. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Use case true of for long chains of dependent conditions
Description
Because AL gives no short-circuit guarantee for and and or, a chain of conditions that must be evaluated in order has to be sequenced with nested if statements — and past three conditions the nesting itself becomes the problem: the body drifts right, the order of evaluation is carried by indentation alone, and any shared failure path is repeated at every level. AL's case statement is the flat alternative. Its value sets "must be an expression or a range", so case true of and case false of accept arbitrary boolean expressions, and the statement "is evaluated, and the first matching value set executes the associated statement" — evaluation stops at the first match, which is exactly the laziness the boolean operators do not provide.
Best Practice
Sequence two or three dependent conditions with nested if. Beyond that, switch to case: use case false of for a chain of guards where every condition must hold, letting control fall past end when all of them pass; use case true of for first-match dispatch, where each later probe runs only if the earlier ones did not match. Conditions that share an action are comma-separated into a single value set, one per line, so the chain reads as one ordered list with one failure action instead of repeating that action per condition. This keeps every condition at one indentation level, makes evaluation order explicit rather than implied by nesting, and preserves the stop-at-first-match behaviour. It also aligns with the AL programming convention that more than two alternatives belong in a case statement rather than an if-then-else.
See sample: case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.good.al.
Anti Pattern
An if ladder four or more levels deep whose only purpose is sequencing guards. Detection: a chain of nested if statements with no else, each condition guarding the one below it, terminating in a single action or exit; or the same exit/error duplicated at every level of such a nested chain, purely to escape it. The second, worse form is collapsing that ladder into one and chain to escape the nesting — that trades indentation for a real defect, because the operands are still all evaluated. Reach for case instead of either.
See sample: case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.bad.al.
See also
boolean-operators-do-not-short-circuit.md covers the underlying evaluation rule that makes the sequencing necessary in the first place.