Inline Conditional Visualforce

Question

I have a simple question that seems to be escaping me at the moment...

The typical way I use inline conditionals is: {!IF(booleanValue,"SOMECONTENT-IF VALUE IS TRUE", "SOMEOTHERCONTENT-IF VALUE IS FALSE")}

With the below conditional, how is it reading the second boolean value '00T'?

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!list}" var="item">
    <apex:column headerValue="Created By">
        <apex:variable var="field" value="{!IF(BEGINS('00a', '00T'), 'Owner.Name', 'CreatedById')}" />
        <apex:outputField value="{!item[field]}" />
    </apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

UPDATE: I wasn't looking at the structure correctly. This is saying:

IF '00a' beings with '00T' then show Owner.Name. IF NOT show CreatedByID.

Answer 1

BEGINS('00a', '00T') always returns false, as it will try to search 00T within 00a

Put your logic properly like this:

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!list}" var="item">
    <apex:column headerValue="Created By">
        <apex:variable var="field" value="{!IF(BEGINS(<field To Compare>, <value to compare>), Owner.Name, CreatedById)}" />
        <apex:outputField value="{!item[field]}" />
    </apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

Answer 2

What the formula you have is actually checking is if the string '00a' begins with the string '00T', which is always false. So you could replace the current merge field in its entirety with {!'CreatedById'}.

A more likely intent would be if list has a mixed collection of SObject records, and you're not sure of the type. In that case, you might want to check if the record is a Task (Id begins with '00T') or some custom object (Id begins with '00a'). If that's the case, your formula would look more like:

IF(BEGINS(item.Id, '00T', 'Owner.Id', 'CreatedById'))

Depends on how many object types you have to handle, how exactly you would proceed. But that's the idea.