It was about two weeks into a project at Tahzoo that I had started in June that I made a discovery that rocked my world: the ternary operator. I think it was my coworker and one of my leads, Piti Itharat, that had introduced it to me. Since then, the ternary operator has become my best friend and I now even make it standard practice in JavaScript, too.
So here’s how I’ve used the ternary operator in Alex Klock‘s Razor Mediator 4 Tridion. You’ll want at least version 1.2 for most of these examples.
Using Ternary Operators in Razor Mediator
An Overview of Ternary Operators
Using a ternary operator is especially useful if you want to output attributes for an HTML element. It saves from using an “If” statement that breaks up the markup. The ternary operator is also useful when you want to output an HTML element that is not-self closing (Razor doesn’t like having elements open, but not close, in the same code block.
How the Ternary Operator Works
If your experience is in DWT design or pure front-ent, you’ll probably want to know how it works. It’s the same as in JavaScript and PHP:
var foo = [logic statement] ? [ If True] : [ if False];
In Razor, we can run a basic ternary operation without assigning it to a variable:
@([logic statment] ? [If True] : [ if False] )
Ternary Operator for attributes
This would do a basic check for a field, and if it exists, output it. If we don’t have a secondary action (which is possible when just outputting text), you can just use String.Empty to finish the operation:
This is by far the most simple, but the downside is that you could end up with a blank alt:
If the client isn’t ok with a blank “alt”, then you could try this. In this case, you’re putting the “alt” statement as a string, concatenating with the value, and you’re escaping the quotes.
@(Fields.AltText != null ? "alt=\""+ Fields.AltText + " \" " : String.Empty)
Adding a “First” class in a foreach loop
The Ternary operator is perfect when you need to add a “first” class to a list. Here, you can just use the IsFirst() method.
@foreach(var item in Fields.Items){