WebMethods: Evaluate String IN and CONTAINS operator

In WebMethods, the most basic way to write a string “IN” operator is to use Branch as follows:

Another way to reduce the number of lines of code is by combining the conditions using “OR”:

These approaches works well if the number of options is small or if the variable name is short. If there are more than a few options, or in the case of a very long variable name, the code will look very messy, and thus, difficult to maintain. For example: 

$work_order.maximo/ns:PublishZZWORKORDER/ns:ZZWORKORDERSet/ns:WORKORDER[0]/ns:STATUS/*body

Using regular expression can simplify the code:

To implement the string “IN” logic, we can use /^value$/. For example, the code below would evaluate to true if $input is exactly one or two or three

To implement the string “CONTAINS” logic, we can use /value/. For example, the below would return true if $input string contains one:

With Regex, it is also simple to check if the variable contains one of several values:

My favourite Martin Fowler’s quote is “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand”. This trick helps me to keep most of my code fits in a single screen.

Happy coding.