[pmwiki-users] using PTVs as shortcuts for conditionals

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 04:34:10PM -0500, Ben Stallings wrote:
> (:if condition 1:)
> message 1
> (:else if condition 2:)
> message 2
> (:else if condition 3:)
> message 3
> (:else if condition 4:)
> message 4
> 
> and I want a whole bunch of other stuff (including pagelists, which have 
> their own conditionals and so end any conditionals in the containing 
> page) to happen only if all of those tests are false.  So I followed 
> message 4 with this:
> 
> (:flag: yes:)
> 
> so that rather than testing conditions 1 through 4 over and over again I 
> could just test for
> 
> (:if equal {$:flag} "yes":)
> 
> ... but it doesn't work.  Are all the conditionals on the page evaluated 
> before all of the page text variables?  That can't be right, because I 
> can use other page text variables in conditionals... so where is the 
> proverbial rub?  --Ben

One cannot use (:if:) directives to conditionally set page text
variables.  When PmWiki goes to read the value of a page text variable
from a page's text, it doesn't try to evaluate the other markups
on a page, such as (:if:).  It just looks for things that match
the page text variable patterns, and returns whatever it finds.


Also, this probably is unrelated, but in general you would want
to write

   (:if equal "{$:flag}" "yes" :)

because otherwise an empty $:flag variable wouldn't appear in the
(:if:) directive.

Hope this helps,

Pm