If Action Icon

If Action

Declaration

<AMIF EXPRESSION="text">

See Also

Loop, The BASIC Language All Groups, Else, End If

Description

Begin a block of steps that are executed conditionally.

Practical Usage

"If" is an extremely useful action. It allows decisions to be made during the execution of the task depending on the result of an expression evaluation. Some examples of simple (although impractical) expressions are: as 1=1 (true). Or 1>2 (false).

Of course the kinds of expressions more likely to be used in the "If" action are: city = "Los Angeles" or count = 100. If the result evaluates to TRUE, AutoMate will execute the block of steps immediately following the If action up until an End If is encountered, otherwise the block will be skipped (or if an Else <AMELSE> statement is encountered it will execute that block of steps). All If actions must be followed at some point with an End If <AMENDIF> to mark the end of the code block that is to be executed if the expression is true.

Parameters

General Tab

Expression
Text, Optional
MARKUP: EXPRESSION="1 > 2"

Specifies a valid BASIC expression.

Notes

Standard Error Handling Options
This action also includes the standard "Error Causes" and "On Error" failure handling options/tabs

More on Error Handling Options

Variables and Expressions
All text fields allow the use of expressions by surrounding the expression in percentage signs (example: %MYVARIABLE%, %Left('Text',2)%). To help construct these expressions, a popup expression builder is available in all these fields by pressing F2.
More on variables...
More on expressions...
More on the expression builder...

Examples

<!-- A simple useless test - should result to true--->
<AMIF EXPRESSION="%1 = 1%">
  <AMMESSAGEBOX MESSAGETEXT="the result was true">
</AMIF>

 

<!-- Another useless test with AMELSE - should result to false--->
<AMIF EXPRESSION="2 = 1">
  <AMMESSAGEBOX MESSAGETEXT="the result was true">
<AMELSE>
  <AMMESSAGEBOX MESSAGETEXT="the result was false">
</AMIF>

 

<!-- Check if it is Friday! Using functions and AMELSE - in this example it will only work if it is actually Friday--->
<AMIF EXPRESSION="Day (Now()) = 5">
  <AMMESSAGEBOX MESSAGETEXT="It's Friday">
<AMELSE>
  <AMMESSAGEBOX MESSAGETEXT="It is not Friday. Lame.">
</AMIF>