orderby meta_value not working with select field values

• julianrob77

• March 8, 2023 at 9:07 am

Need some help here, its driving me nuts

i have a select field with the following options:
AbbVie Inc
Almirall SA
Amgen Inc.
AstraZeneca PLC
Astellas Pharma Inc
Bayer
Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Chugai Pharmaceutical Co Ltd
Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd
Eisai Company Ltd
Eli Lilly and Company
Gilead Sciences Inc
GlaxoSmithKline PLC
Grünenthal GmbH
F Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
H Lundbeck A/S
Ipsen SAS
Johnson & Johnson
Laboratoires Servier
Merck & Co Inc
Merck KGaA
Novartis International AG
Novo Nordisk A/S
Pfizer Inc
Sanofi SA
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd
UCB SA
Vertex Pharmaceuticals

in the front end, i need these to display as per the above in alphabetical order. I have tried several soltuions for this, but none seem to actually work.

below is the code for front end select dropdown:

   <div class="col-md-4">
      <div class="dropdowndiv">
                <label for ="category">Company:</label>
                <div class="selectdiv">
                    <select id="company" name="companyfilter">
                    <option value="">All</option>
                <?php
                $company = $_GET["personnel_company"];
                 $args = array(
                            'post_type'         => 'personnel',
                            'posts_per_page'    => -1,
                            'order'             => 'ASC',
                            'orderby' => 'meta_value',
                            'suppress_filters' => true,
                            'meta_query'    => array(
                            array(
                            'key'       => 'personnel_company',
                             'value'     => ''.$company.'',
                             'compare'   => 'LIKE',
                            )
                            )
                    );
                $memberquery = new WP_Query($args);
                        while ( $memberquery->have_posts() ) : $memberquery->the_post();
                        if (get_field('personnel_company')) {
                        $company_name = get_field('personnel_company');
                        }
                        if(isset($company_name)  && !empty($company_name)) :
                            if (! in_array( $company_name, $unique_company ) ) :
                            // add to array so it doesn't repeat
                            $unique_company[] = $company_name;     
                        ?>
                    <option value=" <?php echo $company_name ?> " > <?php echo $company_name ?> </option>
                    <?php    
                            endif; 
                        endif;     
                      endwhile;
                    wp_reset_postdata(); ?>
            </select><i class="down-arrow">🡣</i>
                </div>
        </div>
    </div>

output on front end:

• julianrob77

• March 8, 2023 at 9:21 am

image link not working, you can see the front end output here: https://imgur.com/a/OyA2cWO

• wpfieldwork

• March 8, 2023 at 12:05 pm

You need to define the meta key to be used to order by, this is different than the meta_query. The easiest way to do this would be to add a ‘meta_key’ => ‘personnel_company’ to your query args (separate from the meta query.)

• julianrob77

• March 8, 2023 at 1:03 pm

Hi, thanks for the help, but my code was Okay.

the meta key is in fact there inside the array, and it does work.

it was in fact the values in the database causing this problem, the data was imported from drupal and was not formatted as text values.

sorted this out now, but not pleasant!