Issues with email scripting - equals throws errors and use of variables fales

[WolframLotz]

Hi everyone, 

I have some issues with velocity and email scripting. Hope that you can tell me what I'm doing wrong. 
Guess you know the example from https://developers.marketo.com/email-scripting showing how to use a simple if construction. 

Trying to use the constructor copy and paste does not work so I tried to adapt it due to the documentation but without success. 

#if(${lead.Salutation} == "Mr")
	#set($greeting = "Dear Mr. ${lead.LastName}")
#else
	#set($greeting = "Error: $lead.Salutation unknown")
#end
$greeting

The result of this code is "Dear Mr. ${lead.LastName}" but the Last Name is not injected into the string. 

Trying the following adaptions brought the same result. (The second without the brackets )

#set($greeting = "Dear Mr. " +${lead.LastName})

#set($greeting = "Dear Mr. " +$lead.LastName)

So I was not able to bring the value of the database into the string, 

Second Issue:

I tried to use .equals() instead of "==" but this threw an error. 

#if(${lead.Salutation}.equals("Mr"))
	"Sehr geehrter Herr ${lead.LastName},"
#else
	${lead.Salutation}
#end

Threw the following error

Cannot get email content- <div>An error occurred when procesing the email Body! </div> <p>Lexical error, Encountered: "e" (101), after : "." at *unset*[line 375, column 27] near</p> <div><pre >&lt;div class=&quot;mktoText&quot; id=&quot;text&quot;&gt; </pre><pre >&lt;p&gt;#if(${lead.Salutation}.equals(&quot;Mr&quot;))</pre><pre class="x-form-item-label"> &quot;Sehr geehrter Herr ${lead.LastName},&quot;</pre><pre >#else</pre><pre > ${lead.Salutation}</pre></div>

 
Do you have an idea what went wrong here?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Unfortunately, the examples in the docs have several errors/suboptimal practices.

---

I tried to use .equals() instead of "==" but this threw an error. 

#if(${lead.Salutation}.equals("Mr"))
	"Sehr geehrter Herr ${lead.LastName},"
#else
	${lead.Salutation}
#end

---

In this particular case you should be using simple references, not formal references.

---

#if(${lead.Salutation} == "Mr")
	#set($greeting = "Dear Mr. ${lead.LastName}")
#else
	#set($greeting = "Error: $lead.Salutation unknown")
#end
$greeting

The result of this code is "Dear Mr. ${lead.LastName}" but the Last Name is not injected into the string. 

---

Most likely because you didn’t check off Last Name in the tree on the right-hand-side of Script Editor.

I recommend you read all my Products Blog posts on Velocity and the additional posts at https://blog.teknkl.com/tag/velocity. These are the seminal sources of information on how to code Velocity correctly for the Marketo context.