For others stuck on this I have a solution.
I tried all sorts of combinations of (examples)
update_user_meta(36, 'delivery_partner', '');
or
update_field('delivery_partner', $a, 'user_36');
but nothing worked.. then I noticed that the issue is because my options are different key => values. ie:
'value' => 7,
'label' => 'darren'
what I need to do is just update the ‘value’ and the label automatically populates correctly… I tested several times.. really unexpected behaviour 🙂
So the solution is:
update_user_meta(36, 'delivery_partner', 13);
36 is the user id
‘delivery_partner’ is the field name
13 is the ‘value’
The result from
$g = get_field('delivery_partner', 'user_36');
is:
Array ( [value] => 7 [label] => darren )
However..
I also realised that this solution only works if the options have been created already. In my case I was using a function to dynamically populate the options on a user edit page.
This meant that if I had not yet visited the user’s admin page (like if im creating a new user), then the above solution wont work and you need to add both ‘value’ and ‘label’ directly with:
update_field('delivery_partner', $partner->ID, 'user_' . $user->ID);
Note that update_field adds both value and label by default in my case.
