Answered How to prevent link tags from being parsed when in if-condition?

Hello MODX community,

i have the following code inside a chunk for a MIGX output, where the [[+url]] is set via a resource select TV :



This works as expected: Only if a resource is set in the TV and [[+url]] is not empty, the "Learn more" link is displayed.

BUT If [[+url]] is empty, i got an entry in the MODX error log:


So it seems that the link tag is parsed even if the condition is not met.
Any ideas how to prevent this behavior?

Thanks in advance!

Try the following


https://docs.modx.com/revolution/2.x/making-sites-with-modx/customizing-content/input-and-output-filters-(output-modifiers)

Would providing an 'else' condition work? ie:

Thanks @Paulp and @AndyTough for your suggestions.
I tried both but none of them made a difference – the "Bad link tag `[[~]]` encountered" is still logged, causing the error log to grow day by day.
So it seems that MODX first creates the URLs before regarding if-conditions.

I wonder if specifying it the other way around would help? So that it is empty unless the condition is met?

@AndyTough I also tried your last suggestion but with same result.
The site in question is running MODX 2.5.5 but referring to https://forums.modx.com/thread/102009/bad-link-tag-since-2-5-5#dis-post-550028 at least 2.5.6 doesn't change this behavior.

Regardless of the error_level, i think MODX wastes time (and performance) in generating URLs first, despite the condition is not met. Maybe i should file an issue on github?

Question for you is how you gonna put in ya other HTML link parts

@donshakespeare Thank you very much for your suggestions and the link to the MODX blog provided.
Now i solved the problem this (quite ugly) way:



Yes, you see it right – another condition inside the first condition. But i can't imagine another straightforward way for creating the MODX link_tag and the surrounding HTML. If i experience performance degradation i will probably move the logic for the markup generation to a snippet but for now it works and the annoying entries in the error log are finally gone. Again, thank you very much.

But, to be honest, this [[[[+url:notempty=`~[[+url]]`]]]] syntax feels like a workaround not like the intended way. And even knowing that nested MODX tags are parsed from inside out I do not understand why this is also the case for conditions. It's a waste of energy parsing each branch of the condition path while only one branch is needed.

I almost never use nested conditional output modifiers. In addition to evaluating all the tags, there's all the parsing time.

Something like this might be much faster (untested):