I have a few custom field groups that are nearly identical in names. With variations in names like, “proj_a_name” and “proj_b_name”.
My field group with “proj_a_name” will not save the data in a variety of fields in that group. I am not experiencing the same thing in the other similar groups. This is why I don’t believe it’s related to the length of the name.
How can I go about troubleshooting this?
So the problem is that keys within two separate field groups are identical. For example of a field group with the id of “acf_project-group-a” and another is “acf_project-group-c”. Within these two groups there are keys that are completely identical. I suppose I know how this happened. In order to duplicate these mostly identical field groups I exported one, imported it, then changed field names and the group name.
I was able to verify this when I exported the PHP code. The part I find the most confusing is regarding the field names listed in ACF. I have unique field names such as, “proj_c_link” visible in the admin. However that field name does not exist once I export the PHP. It is replaced with “proj_a_link” which derives from a separate field group.
As you said, this boils down do the field keys being identical. This is how ACF keeps them in order. Now that you’ve got duplicates you’re going to have a hard time doing anything with either of these groups. The only way you’re going to solve this is to delete the second group and hope that it does not hurt anything.
ACF5 has the ability to duplicate field groups and not have this problem. If you do something similar at some time you can just change the field keys first, for example, something as simple as adding ‘x’ to the end of each one will prevent this.
