bcquality/community/knowledge/performance/case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.bad.al
António Silva 63bd69d7e5 Add case true of pattern for long condition chains
Follow-up from PR review: nested if is the right answer for two or three
dependent conditions, but past that the nesting becomes the problem. AL's
case statement is the flat alternative — the control statements
documentation states a value set "must be an expression or a range" and
that the first matching value set executes, so case true of / case false of
accept boolean expressions and stop at the first match. That is the
laziness the boolean operators do not provide.

Adds case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.md with good/bad AL companions:
case false of for guard chains where every condition must hold, case true of
for first-match dispatch. The bad sample shows both failure shapes — a
five-level if ladder, and the worse escape of collapsing it into an and
chain, which trades nesting for a real defect.

Cross-links both articles, and adds the threshold to the short-circuit
article's Best Practice so following it does not lead to a deep ladder.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-25 12:00:14 +01:00

28 lines
1.1 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.
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;
}