Hierarchical Custom Posts using Relationship custom field

• joeturner

• October 23, 2013 at 10:02 pm

Hi

I have a task of relating two Custom Post Types together using the Relationship field.

The first post type is called ‘Product Categories’. This is a hierarchical set of categories which hold a title and some descriptive text. For example:

1/ Electrical Items
1.1/Drills
1.2/Mowers
2/ Timber
3/ Building Materials
3.1/ Bricks
3.2/ Plumbimg

The second post type is called ‘Branches’. This holds information about a branch such as address, telephone numbers etc etc. It also has a relationship field which allows branches to select which ‘Product Categories’ they stock.

This works on the face of it in terms of it is possible to relate multiple Categories to a Branch, but how the relationship field is displayed doesn’t visually show the hierarchy of the categories, which makes selecting them more difficult than it needs to be.

I have set up a simple fix for the indentation by adding acf_relationship_result to functions.php:

add_filter( 'acf/fields/relationship/result', 'acf_relationship_result', 10, 2); 
function acf_relationship_result( $html, $post )
{

	if($post->post_parent != 0) {
	 
		// new html
		$new = '    ';

	}
	
 
  return $new . $html;
}

However there doesn’t seem to be a way to order the categories correctly so that children appear underneath their parent. Has anyone got a solution or workaround for this?

• Elliot

• October 24, 2013 at 3:39 pm

Hi @joeturner

I think this will be possible by using the other relationship filter:
http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/filters/acf-fields-relationship-query/

This will allow you to add an order_by => ‘menu_order’:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query

And should correctly order the posts!

Thanks
E

• joeturner

• October 24, 2013 at 7:24 pm

Hey

Thanks for the reply.

That helps a little. I now have this filter in place, which as you say, orders the posts by menu_order.

// filter for every field
add_filter('acf/fields/relationship/query', 'my_relationship_query', 10, 3);
function acf_relationship_query( $args, $field, $post )
{
    $args['orderby'] = 'menu_order'; 
    return $args;
}

But, this takes the menu_order as is. By this I mean, you would have a root level post with a menu_order of 1. But you also have a child of a root level post also with a menu_order of 1. This means that the posts aren’t in a hierarchical order still.

Using my example in the first post, you would now have:

1/ Electrical Items
1.1/Drills
3.1/ Bricks
1.2/Mowers
2/ Timber
3.2/ Plumbimg
3/ Building Materials

Really what I need to be able to do is create a recursive function that orders the posts under a specific post, and return them in an ordered array?

• Elliot

• October 27, 2013 at 11:12 am

Hi @joeturner

I can see the issue and unfortunately, i don’t think it will be possible to do what you want without editing the core files.

I have recently done a lot of work with the QP_Query, ordering, and hierarchy of nested posts and found out how to correctly order the posts.

After the WP_Query is complete and you have the $posts, you need to then use a WP function to order them based on the menu/parent attributes.

This will not be possible with the current relationship field, so perhaps you can think of another solution for now?

Thanks
E