If else statement does not work - Solved

Ask the community
,
1

I have a form that triggers an email when submitted. At one point, I didn’t get an email because the submitter didn’t enter an email address. Rather than making it a required field, I tried to assign a standard value if the email field is empty. I can’t figure out why my if statement does not work. When I try out the code, I get an error that the ‘sender’ variable is undefined.

Here is the code:

function sendFormData() {
 const subject = `New Adoption Application - ${$w("#fullnameInput").value}`;
 const body = `Name: ${$w("#fullnameInput").value}
    \rEmail: ${$w("#emailInput").value}
    \rDog: ${$w("#preferreddogText").value}
    \rAddress: ${$w("#fulladdressInput").value}
    \rPhone: ${$w("#primaryphoneInput").value}`;
 
 if ($w("#emailInput") === "") {
 const sender = $w("#emailInput").value;
  } else {
 const sender = "donotreply@gmail.com"; 
  }

  sendEmail(subject, body, sender)
    .then(response => console.log(response)); 
}

Everything works fine if I just assign a value to sender. I have tried several iterations in the if statement

if($w{"#emailInput"}.value === "")

I tried

if($w{"#emailInput"}.valid)

I tried null rather than “”…more than that,
I don’t understand why it doesn’t jump to the ‘else’ part and just assign a value…it does not assign a value to ‘sender’ at all.

One thing I noted in the developer tools is that the inside the if / else statement, the first ‘sender’ was shown as _sender and the second statement (in the else part) was shown as _sender2.

2

It appears that you have an equal number of parentheses → ‘(’ and ‘)’ (13) and that you have an equal number of curly braces → ‘{’ and ‘}’ (9) so I don’t believe that’s the issue.

I’m thinking that your issue may be resolved by replacing the following line:

  if ($w("#emailInput") === "") {

with the following line:

  if ($w("#emailInput").value === "") {

$w(“#emailInput”) represents an object whereas $w(“#emailInput”).value is the property of the object (which is what you really want to check/compare against).

3

Thanks for the input. Neither suggestion made a difference though…

4

Const plays by different rules. Try using let instead. The suggestion to use the value on the input should be retained.

let sender = “”;
if ($w(“#emailInput”).value !== “”) {
sender = $w(“#emailInput”).value;
} else {
sender = “donotreply@gmail.com”;
}

5

@tony-brunsman Thank you very much! That did it. I wasn’t aware I could use let for this. I will have to look at the difference.

6

Just curious; would the following have also worked:

const sender = "";
if ($w("#emailInput").value !== "") {     
  sender = $w("#emailInput").value;
} else {
  sender = "donotreply@gmail.com";
}

?

The idea is the same as defining the let before the if so that it’s not scoped to within the if but to within the sendFormData() function.

7

One of the different rules that const plays by is that it cannot be reassigned. The above will result in an error. In effect, once a variable declared with const is assigned, they become read-only. Let doesn’t have that restriction. You will find a thorough explanation here .