Reply To: Rearrangeable fields

• John Huebner

• April 8, 2016 at 2:35 am

Using the acf validation filters it is possible to prevent the user from selecting the same choice more than once.

Let’s say that you have a repeater field with a key of ‘field_0123456789abc’ and it has a sub field with a key of ‘field_cba9876543210’ and you want to make sure that the sub field in each rows has a unique value.

<?php 
// validate one row of a repeater against other rows of same repeater
add_filter('acf/validate_value/key=field_cba9876543210', 'sub_field_unique', 10, 3);
function sub_field_unique($valid, $value, $field, $input) {
  if (!$valid) {
    return $valid;
  }
  $repeater = 'field_0123456789abc';
  $subfield = 'field_cba9876543210';
  $values = $_POST['acf'][$repeater];
  if (!count($values)) {
    return $valid;
  }
  // extract the current row index from $input
  $current_row = preg_replace('/^\s*acf\[[^\]]+\]\[([^\]]+)\].*$/', '\1', $input);
  $count = count($values);
  foreach ($values as $index => $row) {
    if ($index != $current_row && $value == $row[$subfield]) {
      $valid = 'value must be unique';
    }
  }
  return $valid;
}
?>

The exact logic may be different depending on the field type.