I'm having trouble getting simple IF statements within a Playa tag to evaluate properly

Question

Channels and Fields Summary:

• Tours channel - stores a list of all Vacations the site offers
• • tour_specials field - a Playa field, linked to the Specials channel indicating which Special Offers apply to this tour
• • tour_show_specials_banner field - a Switch to determine whether to show a special offer banner against this entry, if the tour_specials field has any entries
• Specials channel - list of Special Offers that can apply to multiple tours
• Promotions channel - stores lists of tours our partners want to promote. Though it sounds similar to Specials, it is distinct from a business perspective.
• • promotion_tours field - a Playa field that stores multiple tours channel entries, indicating which tours are linked to a promotion

The Problem:

• I have created a Promotions page that gets a Promotion, and lists all tours associated with the promotion from the promotion_tours Playa field
• The listing of tours in the Promotion also needs to check whether a tour has a Special Offer running, by looking at the tour_specials field in the tours entry to see if any Specials apply
• However, all the various code blocks below WILL NOT ever evaluate to true, in the event a tour listed has a Special associated with it

The Code:

Here's the master code block that outputs all Playa entries from the promotion_tours field (all tours associated with the promotion):

{promotion_tours dynamic_parameters="orderby|sort|limit" orderby="title" sort="asc" limit="10" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data" var_prefix="promotions" paginate="bottom"}

    <a href="{promotions:site_url}/{promotions:url_title}">
        <img src="{promotions:tour_gallery limit="1"}{promotions:tour_photo_file:thumbnail}{/promotions:tour_gallery}"/>

        <!-- PROBLEM STARTS HERE -->
        <!-- If we want to show a Special Offer banner... -->
        {if promotions:tour_show_specials_banner}

            <!-- Then check if there are any linked Specials -->
            {if {promotions:tour_specials:total_children} > 0}
                    <img class="special-offer-banner" src="{site_url}images/site/special-offer.png" alt="Special Offer" title="Special Offer" />
            {/if}

        {/if}
    </a>

{/promotion_tours}

I am using a var_prefix to allow my Playa entries to be paginated (see here for an explanation).

You can see where the problem starts is with {if promotions:tour_show_specials_banner}. That statement NEVER evaluates as TRUE, even when I know it should do. The following situations NEVER output anything:

{if promotions:tour_show_specials_banner}
{if tour_show_specials_banner}
{if {promotions:tour_show_specials_banner} == "y"}
{if promotions:tour_show_specials_banner == "y"}
{if {tour_show_specials_banner} == "y"}

I know some are syntactically incorrect but I'm getting to my wits end here...

HOWEVER, if I just output {promotions:tour_show_specials_banner} in my HTML, it outputs y in to the content! Which must evaluate as TRUE!

I'm seriously stumped. Any ideas?

Answer 1

There are some issues in EE 2.9 with conditionals on prefixed variables and variable modifiers which I don't totally grok. (See bug report here for some discussion.)

But the moral is, try this:

{if '{promotions:tour_show_specials_banner}' == 'y'}