Azure Pipeline Does not execute conditional logic correctly

Question

I want to add conditional logic to only run a step if a certain repository has been included (this is a generic yaml script).

To achieve this, I have added a variable:

variables:
  templateRepositoryRef: $[ resources.repositories['templates'].ref ]

And added the following check:

steps:
- ${{ if contains(variables['templateRepositoryRef'], 'refs') }}:
    - script: |
        echo templateRepositoryRef contains refs
        echo templateRepositoryRef: $(templateRepositoryRef)
- ${{ else }}:
     - script: |
        echo templateRepositoryRef does not contain refs
        echo templateRepositoryRef: $(templateRepositoryRef)

The idea being that if the repository resource with the alias templates is contained, this will be a non-empty string.

The output of this is:

templateRepositoryRef does not contain refs
templateRepositoryRef: refs/heads/feature/jira-1234
Finishing: CmdLine

In what world does this make sense? Why is the condition behaving the opposite of how I would expect it to.

Answer 1

I reproduced this issue and do not know why the if/else expressions aren't behaving as expected.

As a workaround I was able to use step conditions to get the desired behavior:

variables:
  templateRepositoryRef: $[ resources.repositories['templates'].ref ]
  ContainsRefs: $[contains(resources.repositories['templates'].ref, 'refs')]

steps:
- script: |
    echo templateRepositoryRef contains refs
    echo templateRepositoryRef: $(templateRepositoryRef)
    echo ContainsRefs: $(ContainsRefs)
  condition: eq(variables['ContainsRefs'],True)

- script: |
    echo templateRepositoryRef does not contain refs
    echo templateRepositoryRef: $(templateRepositoryRef)
    echo ContainsRefs: $(ContainsRefs)
  condition: eq(variables['ContainsRefs'],False)