Reply To: Concern about ACF get_fields() efficiency…

• patch2112

• April 24, 2014 at 12:53 am

There might be some reason this is a bad idea, but what we’ve done when needing a big data pull is something like below. Performance is much better than get_fields or looping through many records with many get_field() calls inside.

Maybe a start of a concept that could be incorporated into the plugin somehow.

// - PEOPLE
function get_people() {
	
	$people = array(); $person_fields = ''; $person_slug = 'person';
	
	// Fields
	$fields = array('first_name', 'middle_name', 'last_name', 'suffix', 'email', 'phone', 'fax', 'linkedin', 'twitter', 'facebook', 'image', 'excerpt');
		
	// Build pull fields
	foreach ($fields as $f) {
		$person_fields .= "
		MAX( CASE WHEN wp_postmeta.meta_key = '".$f."'
		THEN wp_postmeta.meta_value
		END ) AS '".$f."',";
	}
	
	// Query
	$sql = "SELECT * FROM (
		SELECT 
			wp_posts.ID, 
			wp_posts.menu_order, 
			wp_posts.post_title AS 'post_title',
			wp_posts.post_name AS 'post_name',
			".$person_fields."
			concat('".get_bloginfo('url')."/".$person_slug."/',wp_posts.post_name,'/') AS 'permalink'
		FROM wp_posts
		LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta ON ( wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id )
		WHERE wp_posts.post_status = 'publish'
		AND wp_posts.post_type = 'person'
		GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
		ORDER BY menu_order asc, last_name asc, first_name asc		
	) AS t WHERE 1=1";
	$results = $wpdb->get_results($sql,'ARRAY_A'); 

	// Loop
	foreach ($results as $r) {

		// Something Special
		$full_name = $r['first_name'];
		if (!empty($r['middle_name'])) { $full_name .= " " . trim($r['middle_name']); }
		if (!empty($r['last_name'])) { $full_name .= " " . trim($r['last_name']); }
		if (!empty($r['suffix'])) { $full_name .= ", " . trim($r['suffix']); }
		$r['full_name'] = trim($full_name);	
				
		// Package
		$people[$r['ID']] = $r;
	}
	
	return $people;
}

Hope it helps!