Conditional Rendering

Render select elements depending on the cards current data payload.

Different Payloads will be used against adaptive cards depending on the results from the previous states within a Looply Workflow. Different results may require you to change the card to accommodate these changes. e.g. an error message from a previous state in the Looply Workflow.

Note: Using the Card Payload Editor is the easiest method to write the logic for conditional rendering.

Overview

Each element has an "Only show when" attribute which is rendered as the $when attribute in the Card Payload Editor. If this attribute is true, will display the element.

Each element has an "Initially Visible" attribute which is rendered as the isVisible attribute in the Card Payload Editor. If this attribute is true, will display the element when the card first loads. We will not go into detail with this option as it is not as powerful as the $when attribute as described above.

Adding a condition to trigger a true or false value for the $when takes principles described in the Data Binding section and standard logical operations commonly seen in programming languages such as JavaScript.

Note: Due to the conditions being written in a JSON format they need to be encased in a string. Checking if a string equals another will require you to use \ to escape the quotes special character.

Conditionally Rendering an Error Message

If you were to get an error from your Looply Workflow. We may need to display a red banner and a message about what has gone wrong. But we should only display this if we get an error otherwise we should display a success message.

An example payload from a Looply Workflow could look like the following:

{
    "httpRequestSAP_1": {
        "output": {
            "headers": {
                "www-authenticate": "Bearer realm=\"SAP NetWeaver Application Server [GW1/100]\", error=\"invalid_request\", error_description=\"Both, OAuth 2.0 token endpoint and resource server require usage of TLS 1.0. Caller used HTTP instead of HTTPS\"",
                "set-cookie": "sap-usercontext=sap-client=100; path=/",
                "content-length": "0",
                "content-type": "text/html",
                "sap-server": "true"
            },
            "data": "CSRF Token fetch failed",
            "status": "400",
            "statusText": "Bad Request"
        },
        "description": "SAP Update"
    }
}

We want to conditionally render the message at httpRequestSAP_1.output.data if the status is 400 or 500. Below is an example of the card payload from the Card Payload Editor to make this happen:

{
    "type": "AdaptiveCard",
    "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
    "version": "1.5",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "Container",
            "items": [
                {
                    "type": "TextBlock",
                    "text": "SUCCESS",
                    "wrap": true
                }
            ],
            "style": "good",
            // render the success message if the status does not equal 400
            "$when": "${$root.httpRequestSAP_1.output.status != \"400\"}" 
        },
        {
            "type": "Container",
            "items": [
                {
                    "type": "TextBlock",
                    "text": "ERROR - ${$root.httpRequestSAP_1.output.data}",
                    "wrap": true
                }
            ],
            "style": "attention",
            // render the error message if the status equals 400 or 500
            "$when": "${$root.httpRequestSAP_1.output.status == \"400\" || $root.httpRequestSAP_1.output.status == \"500\"}"
        }
    ]
}

All conditions are encased in ${} much like that of data binding.

Note: Similar to the binding in the Binding JSON Arrays section. We can only see the result by testing the card using the Test Card action in the View menu from the Card Toolbar.

Logical Operators

As described above, the logical operators that are available are similar to those found in some programming languages. Below is a list:

Operator	Operation
&&	AND
||	OR
\	Escape Special Character
!=	Not Equals
==	Equals

Prebuilt Functions

You can make use of a number of prebuilt functions in your conditional rendering logic. For more information, visit this link.

Check out Chapter 9 of our Building Adaptive Cards tutorial!