make searching in relationship field accurate, or is it a bug ?

• WEN

• March 16, 2015 at 2:36 pm

I am using field type ‘Relationship’ to relate the post between various post-types.

Can we make the related search more accurate, so it actually returns the post we are looking for when you search for the post by title. Also, is there a way for us to not have to type in the exact title to get the post we are looking for?

I tried searching for iMOM Love Notes ( please see screenshot screenshot-1.png below) to list as a related resource for “10 Ways to Love Your Child” and it did not return in the results?

Another example :

I also tried searching for the post “23 Ways to Show Love for your husband” by typing in “show love to your husband” ( please see screenshot screenshot-2.png below) and the post didn’t’ show in the search results.

Because there are so many posts on my site I want for the related search to work correctly and help us find the related posts that we are looking for.

Is there any other tweaks I can do through available filter/hooks, without editing plugin, please suggest. Your any advice and suggestion would be highly appreciated.

Looking forward to your kind response.

screenshot-1....png

screenshot-2....png

• Zelus

• March 28, 2015 at 5:28 am

You’re not the only one experiencing this issue; my team and myself are as well.

This issue was originally fixed in 3.40:

[Fixed] Fix relationship search – Only search title, not content

But it looks like it has resurfaced with the changes in WordPress 4.x. Hopefully someone on the ACF team will notice this thread.

• Annette

• April 19, 2015 at 5:40 pm

We too have this problem.

In core/relationship.php it appears that acf is using WP’s search (‘s’ parameter in a query) which searches both title and content. With hundreds of organisations having the word ‘support’ in their content it makes selecting the one organisation with title Support U in the normal way (just typing it into the search box) almost impossible in practice (though putting double quotes round the whole search term can help).

• James

• June 20, 2016 at 8:33 pm

Hi @wen

I am afraid I cannot replicate this on the latest version v5.3.9.1 of the Pro version.

It is safe to assume that this was fixed on an earlier update.

• R Scott LaMorte

• February 20, 2018 at 10:25 am

This isn’t fixed or it’s broken again. ACF Relationship Field appears to use the default WordPress query, which searches for matches in post_title, post_excerpt, and post_content.

Tested on stock WordPress 4.9.3 and ACF 5.6.8.