Dynamically populating repeater fields with default values?

• folosophy

• November 18, 2016 at 2:30 pm

I have a scenario where I need a bunch of repeater fields with two sub fields each: one for a name (which should not be editable) and another for a value score.

I created an options page with the list of names that each of the repeater fields should have, and used prepare_field to set the number of fields to the length of the list — that all works fine. Here’s that code:

add_filter('acf/prepare_field/key=field_582e290a22e62', 'preparefield');

function preparefield($field) {
  // see all the field settings before changing
  //echo '<pre>'; print_r($field); echo '</pre>';

  $num = get_field('medication_types','option');
  $num = count($num);

  $field['max'] = $num;
  $field['min'] = $num;

  return $field;
}

add_filter('acf/prepare_field/name=medication_types', 'medicationTypes');

My problem is I can’t insert the options page list of names into the repeater field names. I was able to use load_value to echo out all the repeater field values, but I can’t quite figure out how to actually set them.

Has anyone worked on something similar?

• folosophy

• November 18, 2016 at 2:35 pm

Just as an example, say this is the list of names in the options page:

Hospital
Pharmacy
Surgery Center

etc…

What I need to do is set those as default values in the repeater name subfields on every new post that’s created:

Row 1
-Name: Hospital
-Value: (User will set)

Row 2
-Name: Pharmacy
-Value: (User will set)

Row 3
-Name: Surgery Center
-Value: (User will set)

• James

• November 18, 2016 at 4:58 pm

Hi @folosophy

You should be able to do it like this:

function my_acf_set_repeater( $value, $post_id, $field ){
    
    $value = array();
    
    // this one should consists array of the names
    $settings_values = get_field('medication_types','option');
    
    foreach( $settings_values as $settings_value ){
        $value []= array('field_1234567890abc' => $settings_value['name_field'], 'field_abc1234567890' => '');
    }

    return $value;
}

// acf/load_value/name={$field_name} - filter for a specific value load based on it's field name
add_filter('acf/load_value/key=field_582e290a22e62', 'my_acf_set_repeater', 10, 3);

Where “field_1234567890abc” is the name field key, “field_abc1234567890” is the value field key, and “name_field” is the name field in the “medication_types” repeater.

I hope this helps 🙂

• folosophy

• November 19, 2016 at 2:46 am

Hey James, thanks for the help!

I had to make a tweak to your code to get it to work. I added a counter to modify the $value array instead of building it from scratch (otherwise it replaces any value the user sets with ‘ ‘).

function my_acf_set_repeater( $value, $post_id, $field ){

    // echo '<pre>'; print_r($value); echo '</pre>';

    // this one should consists array of the names
    $settings_values = get_field('medication_types','option');

    $i = 0;

    foreach( $settings_values as $settings_value ){

      $value[$i]['field_582e293d22e63'] = $settings_value['type'];

      $i++;

    }

    //echo '<pre>'; print_r($value); echo '</pre>';

    return $value;

}

add_filter('acf/load_value/name=medication', 'my_acf_set_repeater', 10, 3);

I realized, though, that using indexed repeater fields is not a smart way to do this—the client could mess it up by reordering the repeater fields.

I’ll probably redo it as a normal named field repeater, then set the field names as a prefixed version of the medication types fields… that way the client can’t reorder the fields, and they can change the medication type names without wrecking the fields.

Cheers!

• codeview

• April 11, 2017 at 12:38 am

Thank you @folosophy for posting the code (and the fix w/ the counter). I’m wondering if you would be able to help with a solution for pre-populating the repeater with post titles from a custom post type instead of values from another ACF repeater?

I have a Custom Post Type “Teams” and each post’s title is a team name. I would like to pre-populate an ACF Repeater Field with each team name. Any suggestions?

• francistan77

• April 4, 2020 at 1:25 am

Sorry, I know this is a very later post but very badly need it, I have an options page using ACF

This is the structure (OPTIONS PAGE)

- specifications - group

-- specifications_repeater - repeater

--- specification_name - text

so on the options page I added 3 fields and save

Size
Range
Colour

Now I have another another custom fields set in pages

- specifications - repeater

-- specification_item - text (populate this fields based on the "specification_name" field on the options page)

-- specification_value - text

What I want and hoping that it populates whatever its in the options page, so it will populate automatically the fields ( Size, Colour & Range )

I have this code below but it only populates “Colour” on all its fields, I think its pulling the last data.

function my_acf_load_field($field) {
    $field['default_value'] = array();
    if( have_rows('specifications', 'option') ) {
        while( have_rows('specifications', 'option') ) {
            the_row();

            if( have_rows('specifications_repeater', 'option') ) {
                while( have_rows('specifications_repeater', 'option') ) {
                    the_row();

                    $value = get_sub_field('specification_name');
                    $field['default_value'] = $value;

                }
            }

        }
    }
    //$field['default_value'] = uniqid();
    return $field;
}
add_filter('acf/load_field/key=field_5e86e1166f98a', 'my_acf_load_field');

also field_5e86e1166f98a is the target field