I originally thought it was a casting issue, i'll blame that goose chase on insomnia. After i got some sleep i looked at the parsing itself and it was a simple fix. What's happening with that code is OR(AND will as well) forces a conversion to boolean. IF, WHEN..THEN and UNTIL have no issue with booleans. The real issue was the regex for the conditional forbids the usage of double quotes and braces. Doing 'status == "LANDED"' should have also converted to boolean but the bug prevented it getting that far.