ACF 5.0+ Dynamically Populating Repeater

• Howdy_McGee

• August 9, 2018 at 5:00 am

I’ve been reading a ton of topics regarding populating the repeater field and they all say the same thing: “Use acf/load_Value hook and return a multidimensional array of values keyed by subfield keys”. Which I have an example of below:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [field_5b69f119ce5d2] => Name Here
            [field_5b69f1a8ce5d4] => Address Here
        )
)

Whenever I run mock tests, the filter hook expects an integer ( number of subfields ) to be returned. Then all the subfields are run through the same acf/load_value hook but there’s nothing to discern them from regular fields besides the concatenated name. Are the old ways supposed to work in 5.0+? With acf-json? Open to any tips or suggestions on how I can get his to work.

—

What I’m trying to do is load values from a custom table into the repeater field. Assuming I have an array as seen above, how to I populate the repeater field as such? I’m using acf-json to store my fields. Here’s the function I’m working with:

add_filter( 'acf/load_value', function populate_custom_table_data( $value, $post_id, $field ) {

	if( ! empty ( $value ) && ! empty( $field['custom-attribute-here'] ) ) {
		return $value;
	}

	$table_util = new Custom_Table_Utility();
	$value 		= $table_util->get_data( $post_id, $field['name'] );
	$value 		= ( empty( $value ) && 'true_false' !== $field['type'] ) ? '' : $value;

	// Replace reapter field name keys with actual field keys
	if( 'repeater' == $field['type'] && ! empty( $value ) ) {

		/*
		*	$value = Array
		*	(
		*		[0] => Array
		*			(
		*				[database_column_name] => Name Here
		*				[database_col_address] => Address Here
		*			)
		*	)
		*/

		$subfield_keys = wp_list_pluck( $field['sub_fields'], 'key' );
		
		if( count( $subfield_keys ) == count( $value[0] ) ) {

			foreach( $value as $key => $row_values ) {
				$value[ $key ] = array_combine( $subfield_keys, $row_values );
			}

			/*
			*	$value = Array
			*	(
			*		[0] => Array
			*			(
			*				[field_5b69f119ce5d2] => Name Here
			*				[field_5b69f1a8ce5d4] => Address Here
			*			)
			*	)
			*/

		}

	}

	return $value;

}, 10, 3 );

I’ve also tried to populate it into the sub_fields index using the acf/load_field hook to no avail. With the acf/load_field hook I tried skipping repeater fields entirely and returning the row count but both shows the same results. I think I’m too early at this hook so it’s ignoring the sub_fields.

• Howdy_McGee

• August 24, 2018 at 9:16 am

The solution is a bit messy and filled with a bunch of my classes functionality that won’t make much sense.

The gist is that:

• Repeaters need an integer count of expected subfields returned as a value from this hook.
• Subfields names are prefixed with the parent repeater name.

What I did was check the field type against ‘repeater’ and returned my custom database value count. At the top of the hook I checked if the $field[‘parent’] was empty, if not I used get_field_object( $field['parent'], $post_id, false, false ) to get the parent field name that the subfield are prefixed with.

Once I returned the count to the repeater and stripped the parent name prefix off the subfields I was able to prepopulate the repeater with my custom table data. I have no idea if this will be helpful to anyone but at least it’s no longer a niche issue on the forums here.

• mcnab

• September 14, 2018 at 11:46 pm

Thanks for posting the solution – even returning an integer has moved me forward a bit.

I know you are saying your code is full of red herrings relating to your plugin, could you post some of it anyway? – I can’t workout what to do based on this;

stripped the parent name prefix off the subfields I was able to prepopulate the repeater with my custom table data

Tantalising. Sorry to be a pain asking for the codez !

Robbie

• Howdy_McGee

• September 18, 2018 at 4:25 am

@mcnab It looks like this:

/**
 * Load value from custom table
 * 
 * @param Mixed $value
 * @param Integer $post_id
 * @param Array $field
 * 
 * @return $value
 */
function populate_custom_table_data( $value, $post_id, $field ) {

	if( ! empty( $value ) ) {
		return $value;
	}

	$has_parent_field	= false;
	$field_name 		= $field['name'];

	/**
	 * Grab parent field and get value by the parent field name
	 * Use conditional below to populate the actual fields.
	 */
	if( ! empty( $field['parent'] ) && false !== strpos( $field['parent'], 'field_' ) ) {

		// false, false is important to prevent infinite recursive loop.
		$parent_field 	  = get_field_object( $field['parent'], $post_id, false, false );
		$has_parent_field = ( ! empty( $parent_field ) );
		$field_name 	  = ( $has_parent_field ) ? $parent_field['name'] : $field_name;

	}
	
	// Grab data from custom table
	$db_data   	= $this->data_util->get_data( $post_id, $field_name );
	$value		= $db_data;

	// Return early if value is empty
	if( empty( $value ) ) {
		return $value;
	}

	// We're in a subfield
	if( $has_parent_field ) {

		$field_concat_name = $field['name'];
		$field_concat_name = str_replace( sprintf( '%1$s_', $field_name ), '', $field_concat_name );
		preg_match( '(\d{1,})', $field_concat_name, $possible_keys );

		if( ! empty( $possible_keys ) ) {

			$arr_index 			= $possible_keys[0];
			$field_concat_name 	= str_replace( sprintf( '%1$d_', $arr_index ), '', $field_concat_name );

			// Now we know what index in our subarray
			$subfield_arr		= $db_data[ $arr_index ];

			// Overwrite $value to actual subfield value
			// Now that we know the name we can grab it from our named index array
			$value = ( ! empty( $subfield_arr[ $field_concat_name ] ) ) ? $subfield_arr[ $field_concat_name ] : '';
		}
		

	} else if( 'repeater' == $field['type'] ) {	// Return repeater count

		$value = count( $db_data );

	}

	return $value;

}
add_filter( 'acf/load_value', 'populate_custom_table_data', 20, 3 );

• mcnab

• September 18, 2018 at 8:14 pm

@howdy_mcgee – you are an absolute legend.

Thanks a million for coming back with this, it’s a huge help. Will crack on with this and reply to add anything I can to the thread for future users.

Cheers,

Robbie

• mcnab

• September 19, 2018 at 1:13 am

I was running ACF PRO 5.7.0 but as an mu-plugin so it wasn’t obvious to me there was newer versions.

Elliot replied in a ticket to me;

In the most recent versions of ACF and ACF PRO we have moved around the order of actions allowing the “acf/load_value” action to run last (after “acf/load_value/type=repeater”).

If you hook into the “acf/load_value” filter, you should now be able to customize the repeater field value as an array, not as a numeric number.

So this has changed very recently. Now with version 5.7.6 you can handle it like this;

	function my_acf_load_method($value, $post_id, $field) {
			
		if ($field['type'] == 'number') {

			$value = 123;			

			return $value;

		} elseif ($field['type'] == 'repeater') {	
		
			$value[] = array(
				'field_url' => 'http://www.google.com',
				'field_text' => 'Google'
			);

			return $value;
			
		}	
		
	}
	
	add_filter('acf/load_value', 'my_acf_load_method', 20, 3);

Checking the value of your repeater, returning $value as a string where the acf/load_value method is expecting a string, and $value as an array when it’s expecting an array.

Much easier, thanks again Howdie_McGee.