hey all question about the eventual introduction of the `cas

Question

hey all question about the eventual introduction of the `case` statement in prefect 2 0 is there a rough timeline for when that may be introduced Also are there any major differences that are planned between how they work in prefect 1 0 where i think you can only conditionally go between tasks to say possibly supporting subflows

Anna Geller · Answer

there is no need for that you can run any if else statements both in your tasks and in your flows in Prefect 2 0 tada

Kevin Kho · Answer

You don t necessarily need case because you can use the native Python `if` inside a flow now ``` flow def myflow a = task one if a result == ```

Jai P · Answer

ah yes i saw that was possible but i could ve sworn in the documentation it said `case` was coming and i wasn t sure in what case i d use that over just native `if`

Jai P · Answer

but now i can t find said quote in the documentation

Kevin Kho · Answer

I don t quite see a use case for `case` because `if` is more flexible The previous `case` only tested for equality Not greater than or less than so you needed an intermediate task to achieve that

Jai P · Answer

hmmm ok i mean i like using `if` statements more but im curious if that has the same implication that it did in prefect 1 0 meaning tasks subflows not run due to an `if` are marked as `Skipped`

Jai P · Answer

but maybe that s not the intended experience and the tasks aren t really Skipped they re not even considered as part of the execution path so they re never included

Kevin Kho · Answer

Yeah exactly so they aren t Skipped cuz they aren t added

Jai P · Answer

got it so i guess the one interesting thing is because now you re essentially forced to call ` result ` does that possibly introduce some weirdness in execution dependencies

Jai P · Answer

as an example ``` flow def my flow a = task one if a result task two else task three ``` i won t necessarily see that `task one` was `wait for`d on `task two` or `task three`

Kevin Kho · Answer

You can still use `wait for` in `task two` and `task three` but they will wait for `a` by default ` result ` is actually ` wait result ` implicitly

Jai P · Answer

yup i guess it was just pointing out that `orion` wouldn t necessarily reflect the waiting

Jai P · Answer

so as an engineer if you want to ensure that the dependency properly shows up in orion you need the `wait for` if you don t care about that particular thing then it is fine because it implicitly happens anyways

Kevin Kho · Answer

Yes that is completely right Just wondering how important is it for you to have all of those connected in the Radar plot

Jai P · Answer

I don t actually know that it s that important for us yet though i can imagine situations where someone wants to understand the flow execution visually but can t because everything is laid out on the radar view at the same level

Jai P · Answer

But given there s a simple workaround that isn t that code intensive I think we can work around that

Kevin Kho · Answer

That s true but I noticed this as well when doing something like A gt B gt C and all are mapped and then some number of A raise SKIP Lineage gets broken But we will explicit create a SKIP state though in the future that connects it