Hi @carlparkerwp that’s correct, but it’s a bit more complex than that.
I’m trying to update the entire $fields array with default values (which I’m pulling from a block in another post) at once, and I want to make sure the edit-form fields are populated correctly as well.
I actually found my solution after some trial and error. It turns out that in the acf/pre_render_fields filter get_fields() will return false if the current block was not saved to the database previously.
So, this works for my case:
add_filter( 'acf/pre_render_fields', function( $fields, $post_id ) {
if(!get_fields($post_id)) {
// add some default values to the $fields array
}
$return fields;
}, 10, 2
Actually, I’m doing some additional checks to see If I’m actually loading field blocks, so my actual code is this:
add_filter( 'acf/pre_render_fields', function( $fields, $post_id ) {
if (
// check if we are fetching a block
($_POST['action'] ?? '') !== 'acf/ajax/fetch-block' ||
// check if we are loading the block's edit-form (not the preview)
($_POST['query']['form'] ?? '') !== 'true' ||
// check if the block is a new block
get_fields() !== false
) {
return $fields;
}
$fields = populate_fields_with_default_data($fields, $fields[0]['parent']);
return $fields;
}, 20, 2 );
For brevity I haven’t included the entire populate_fields_with_default_data() function. This is a pretty complicated custom function that I have written for my own use case, so I don’t think others will benefit from this 🙂
