Using CASE instead of conditional function and vice versa

Reports situations when CASE and IF are interchangeable.

Example (MySQL):

SELECT CASE
WHEN C1 IS NULL THEN 1
ELSE 0
END
FROM dual;

To keep your code short, you can replace the CASE structure with IF. You can do that by applying the Replace with 'IF' call intention action. The example code will look as follows:

SELECT IF(C1 IS NULL, 1, 0)
FROM dual;

To revert IF to CASE, click IF and apply the Replace with CASE expression intention action.

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

SqlCaseVsIf

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | SQL

Inspection ID: SqlCaseVsIfInspection

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Using CASE instead of conditional function and vice versa inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Prefer CASE expressions over IF functions

Option ID:

preferCase

Default value:

Not selected

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection SqlCaseVsIf

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2025.2, DataGrip 2025.2, DataSpell 2025.2, GoLand 2025.2, IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, JetBrains Rider 2025.2, PhpStorm 2025.2, PyCharm 2025.2, Qodana for .NET 2025.2, Qodana for Go 2025.2, Qodana for JS 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2, Qodana for PHP 2025.2, Qodana for Ruby 2025.2, RubyMine 2025.2, WebStorm 2025.2

Last modified: 18 September 2025