Using curly bracket with directive

[Ranco Marcus]

I'm experiencing a problem when I use curly brackets around the else directive (see example below). The problem is that the string #{else} is itself copied to the output instead of being recognized and parsed as a directive.

#if($column.Nullable)NULL#{else}NOT NULL#end

Can anybody give me a hint on how this feature is used? Or is it a bug perhaps?

Kind regards,

Ranco

[Mike Bridge]

Hi-

Yes, I think that is supposed to work---it seems like a bug.  You may need to use a workaround, like using two #if statements, or else define an empty string as a variable:

  #set($empty="")
  #if($column.Nullable)NULL#else${empty}NOT NULL#end

Cheers,

-Mike

[Ranco Marcus]

Mike, thanks for your response. The workaround works perfectly.

Btw, why are the curly braces needed around empty?

Regards,

Ranco

[Mike Bridge]

Hi-

Normally, you can put curly braces around variables and directives to set them off from the surrounding alphanumeric characters.  It could also be that NVelocity is based on a version of Velocity that hadn't implemented parentheses around a directive....

-Mike

[Mike Bridge]

I was just revisiting this; it is probably nicer to omit the "else" entirely:

#set($nulltest="NOT NULL")
#if($column.Nullable)#set($nulltest="NULL")#end 

  SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE mycol IS $nulltest

Cheers,

-Mike