Filtering posts with multiple select

• Galadh

• December 9, 2016 at 10:03 am

Hello and thank you for this wonderful plugin!

I use a custom post type and I need to filter them by type, the type being a “Select” field called “tipo_lemma”. I have selected the option “Select multiple” values” because some posts have more than one type.

Now, I need to show all the posts that share a certain type, both those which have a single type and those which have multiple value.
For example, if I have:
post1 = typeA
post2 = typeA, typeB
If I filter by “typeA” I need to see both of them. If I filter by “typeB” just the second one.

If I use this code, it shows only those with a single type, while those with more than one type don’t appear at all:

if (isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"]!='') {
 	$add_args[meta_key] = 'tipo_lemma';
 	$add_args[meta_value] = $_GET["type"];

If I use this code, it’s the opposite: the page displays only the posts with more than one type, while those with only one type don’t appear (with some exceptions: strangely it shows also some posts with only one type when there is a link in another wysiwyg field – perhaps because I use a str_replace script, or because the full query is kind of complex):

if (isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"]!='') {
    $add_args[meta_query] = array(
        array(
            'key' => 'tipo_lemma',
            'value' => serialize(strval($_GET["type"])), 
            /*It's the same with: 'value' => '"'.$_GET["type"].'"',*/
            'compare' => 'LIKE'
        )
    );
 }

Any advice and suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

• James

• December 9, 2016 at 4:49 pm

Hi @galadh

If the query is like this: &type=typeA,typeB, then you need to add a query for each type listed. It should be something like this:

if (isset($_GET["type"]) && $_GET["type"]!='') {
    
    // get the listed types in an array
    $types = explode(',', $_GET[ "type" ]);
    
    // initialize the meta query
    $add_args['meta_query']['relation'] = 'OR';
    
    // loop through the types and add it to the query
    foreach( $types as $type ){
        $add_args['meta_query'] []= array(
            'key' => 'tipo_lemma',
            'value' => '"'. $type .'"',
            'compare' => 'LIKE'
        );
    }

}

I hope this helps 🙂

• Galadh

• December 10, 2016 at 2:17 am

It came out there was another problem (my fault!): there were almost 300 posts when I switched on the option “Select multiple values”, so I guess all the old posts still have a string in the field “tipo_lemma”, while the new ones have an array whether they have one or more type selected.

In fact, if I change the option “Return value” from “Label” to “Array” nothing happens, but when I open and save again the old posts, then it works. I just need to re-save all the posts then.

Thank you for the support! Your code works perfectly, so I’ll mark the question as solved 🙂