Dynamically adding to choices on save

• squarestarmedia

• June 7, 2017 at 5:58 am

I have a single-row repeater that has a select field and an input field. The user should be able to use the text field to add a missing choice to the select. When the post gets saved, the select choices should update to include the new choice and the text field should be cleared.

I was having some success with my own solution, but at some point it stopped working, with some very weird results (like the updated select having its post-type changed!).

The final function I wrote, which was supposed to do make the actual changes, is shown below.

I would be very grateful if anyone could suggest an alternative method, as this is now an urgent problem for a client.

Thanks.

	
function updateAssociatedSelect(
	$parentFieldObject, $newChoice, $selectSubField, $textSubField, $postId
) {
	// Get the field's post ID because acf_update_field() requires it
	$selectSubField['ID'] = acf_get_field_id($selectSubField['key']);
	
	// Update the select sub-field with the new choice if required
	if (!in_array($newChoice, $selectSubField['choices'])) {
		$selectSubField['choices'][$newChoice] = $newChoice;
		natcasesort($selectSubField['choices']);
		acf_update_field($selectSubField);
	}

	// Update the post's values for the sub-fields
	while (have_rows($parentFieldObject['key'], $postId)) {
		the_row();
		// Get the existing choices
		$values = get_sub_field($selectSubField['key']);
		if (is_array($values)) {
			// Add the new choice if there are already others...
			array_push($values, $newChoice);
			natcasesort($values);
		} else {
			// ...or set $values to the new choice
			$values = $newChoice;
		}
		// Add the new values to the select
		update_sub_field($selectSubField['key'], $values); 
		// Clear the text's value
		update_sub_field($textSubField['key'], '');
	}
}