I’m not the developer so I’m just stating what I know from years (many) of using ACF.
Is it possible to use the same code to find a field as it is for displaying field groups in the admin?
Showing field groups in the admin is based on the field group, not the individual fields, this is top down, not bottom up. The only way to know if a field is shown is to know if the field group should be shown.
Is it possible to find a field for a post in the same way? Yes, here is what would be involved.
- Get all of the field groups that can be shown based on the post ID.
- Loop over each field group and then all of the fields in in each group until a matching field name is found.
It would have to be repeated for every field.
This process would be extremely inefficient at scale.
