Does 0 equal 0.00?

[Kent Multer]

I was working on some template code, and I was surprised to see this conditional on the BASK and INVC pages:

<mvt:if expr="l.settings:item:price EQ '0' OR l.settings:item:price EQ '0.00' OR l.settings:item:price EQ 0.00 OR l.settings:item:price EQ 0">

I thought the VM regarded all those as equivalent. Can someone please clarify?

Thanks --

[dcarver]

You are correct. I'm not seeing that anywhere in our base templates. Maybe a PS developer or 3rd party developer added it?

[Kent Multer]

I saw it in a couple of places in this store, and I think I've seen it before in other stores, but don't recall where. Thanks for the clarification.

Also, what's a "PS developer" please? I don't recognize that abbreviation.

[dcarver]

Professional Services at Miva.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Actually, its been there for years. I think at least since the first ready themes.

PS = Professional Services

And just for clarity, I believe that would be true (that they are all equal) only if the field type was a number. If the field type is text, then they are not the same.

[dcarver]

The underlying data type does not matter. They are all the same and will all evaluate to true.

[Kent Multer]

IIRC, the VM processes the comparison operators (LT, GT, EQ, LE, GE, NE) by first trying to do a numeric comparison. If either of the operands is not a valid number, then the VM switches to a string comparison. And for numeric-comparison purposes, empty-string is equivalent to zero, and all forms of zero -- string or numeric, with or without decimal point -- are equivalent.

I suppose that, if you're doing an SQL query with a comparison in it, the behavior may be different, since the comparison is processed by the DB server, not the VM. But once you bring the data into Miva Script variables, the VM is in charge.

[RayYates]

This conditional simplifies the test by forcing a numeric comparison.

<mvt:if expr="(l.settings:item:price * 1) EQ 0) ">
Zero Price
</mvt:if>