Answered Conditional output modifiers with "less" not working properly?

Hi there,
I had a strange encounter yesterday when I wanted to use a css class in a getResources template. The first 3 items should get the class "highlight":

But this did not work, because ALL items got the class "highlight".
What worked was this:

Mark Hamstra tweeted that I should use an "else=``" but RTFM does not say "else is mandatory". Still, his hint solved the problem for now. Thanks, Mark.
But with "greater something" I can drop the else an it is still working: I get the "highlight" class for the items 4 and up (in this case it's the wrong class, but the point should get clear):

I discovered that all conditionals using "less something" behave in this strange way and need an "else" statement to work properly. Still "greater something" is allways working fine.
Am I stuck in a logic circle or is this a bug?

cheers
Oliver [ed. note: mindeffects last edited this post 13 years, 7 months ago.]

I imagine that if there's no else, MODX has no way of knowing what it should do if the condition is not met, so I suspect that the result is unreliable.

It might also make a difference to make the tag uncached:



I would probably do it with a one-line snippet:

Thanks for the reply, Bob!
Quote from: BobRay at Feb 15, 2013, 04:01 AM

I imagine that if there's no else, MODX has no way of knowing what it should do if the condition is not met, so I suspect that the result is unreliable.

Yes, but the MODX behaviour should be consistent – or, at least, "do nothing" instead of "jump to a silly conclusion". ;-)

But "MODX has no way of knowing what it should do" does not really explain why MODX can do this properly:

and fails with that:

Sure, there are workarounds to get MODX to behave as wished, but this should be an "out of the box" feature which works for both "greater than" and "less than"!

Quote from: BobRay at Feb 16, 2013, 12:51 AM

If you read the docs here: http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Input+and+Output+Filters+(Output+Modifiers)#InputandOutputFilters%28OutputModifiers%29-Conditionaloutputmodifiers
The descriptions for both those modifiers say: Used with "then" and "else". There's no indication that the "else" is optional.

Thanks, Bob! Glad to hear that it is my fault and that MODX is working fine! I might have not understood the description in the way, that else has "allways" to be used – caused by a lack of language skills, I guess. ;-)

Maybe I also got confused because of this example on the same page, where no else is used:

Perhaps I'll add an extra line to the RTFM where this else-thing is made more clearly for people like me.

I'd be very surprised if this works, but I've been wrong lots of times before.