List all terms that who's custom field has a specific value

• JacobDB

• August 13, 2015 at 4:36 am

I have two taxonomies set up, Make and Model, and I need to associate each Model term with a specific Make term. I have a custom taxonomy field set up for Model, so you can pick which ever Make is associated, but now I’m having trouble displaying these on the front end. I need to display a select list filled with terms that match a specific make.

For example, I could have these Makes:

Honda
Ford
Toyota

And these models:

Civic
Accord
Taurus
Escort
Prius
Corrola

The models are then linked to each make, like this:

Civic [Honda]
Accord [Honda]
Taurus [Ford]
Escort [Ford]
Prius [Toyota]
Corrola [Toyota]

Finally, on the front end, I’d want to display these something like:

Honda
– Civic
– Accord
Ford
– Taurus
– Escort
Toyota
– Prius
– Corrola

I could just do a foreach loop for each make, then a foreach loop inside that that checks to see if the associated make matches the currently listing make, but that seems database heavy. I’d really like a way to just query for terms by their custom field value.

• Jonathan

• August 13, 2015 at 7:39 am

Hi @revxx14

Not that I want to be “that guy” but why don’t you just use a single hierarchal taxonomy for both make and model?

That way your interactions with it in code will be very simple and as an added bonus you’ll be able to get sweet URL structures like /make/honda/civic/.

• JacobDB

• August 13, 2015 at 11:39 pm

So I kind of simplified how I’m displaying these on the front end. In actuality, it’s displaying in three select fields, with each taxonomy in it’s own field, and then some jQuery to show and hide different fields based on the user’s selection of Make.

Honestly I did think about doing it that way, but I didn’t want me client to be able to set up levels deeper than needed (for example, if I made it hierarchical, they could set up Honda > Civic > Accord > Fit > Element, and just keep going down).

Maybe I’ll just switch to hierarchical if this can’t be easily done; I can always just warn my client that making deeper levels of makes/models could break things.

• Jonathan

• August 14, 2015 at 5:48 am

Yeah,

The way I see it is that you could either switch to hierarchal single tax, do the “hacky” solution you have set up or switch so that your client sets the models on the make term instead.. It will require them to go into the make term after the model term has been created but will allow you to optimize the code since then you can just loop through each make and spit our it’s relational models.

OR go your own route with a custom SQL 🙂 But honestly SQL isn’t my strong suite..