Re: Using CASE with a boolean value

ok,

everything works.  It worked all along....I was just grabbing the initial
boolean value by mistake.

Thanks all

Tom

On Friday 24 May 2002 12:24 pm, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tom Ansley <tansley@law.du.edu> writes:
> > CASE booking.quiz
> >     WHEN booking.quiz=false THEN 'No'
> >     WHEN booking.quiz=true THEN 'Yes'
> >     ELSE 'No'
> > END
>
> You seem to be confused about the two forms of CASE.  You can either
> write boolean WHEN conditions or provide a value to be compared against
> a series of alternative match values.  What you have here is an unholy
> mixture of both, which would never have been accepted at all if
> booking.quiz had not chanced to be a boolean value.  The system will
> take it as (booking.quiz = (booking.quiz=false)), etc.  I'm far too lazy
> to work out the exact implications of that, but it's probably not what
> you want.
>
> I'd write a CASE on a boolean value like this:
>
> CASE WHEN booking.quiz THEN 'Yes' ELSE 'No' END
>
> or if I wanted to distinguish UNKNOWN (NULL) as
>
> CASE booking.quiz
>   WHEN true THEN 'Yes'
>   WHEN false THEN 'No'
>   ELSE 'Unknown'
> END
>
> Or you could write it as
>
> CASE
>   WHEN booking.quiz=true THEN 'Yes'
>   WHEN booking.quiz=false THEN 'No'
>   ELSE 'Unknown'
> END
>
> which is actually what the system will expand the previous example into.
> But writing it out seems un-idiomatic to me.  (I always look at 'boolean
> = TRUE' kinds of tests as the mark of a beginner programmer who hasn't
> quite absorbed the notion of a boolean value...)
>
>             regards, tom lane