Pre-populate checkbox choices per repeater row

• Twansparant

• July 29, 2019 at 7:16 pm

Hi there,

I was wundering if the following is possible;

1) I have a repeater in my options page to add questions to a form. Each row has a label and another repeater containing every possible answer.

2) In one of my field groups I want to pre-populate a repeater field with rows for each question from this options page, containing:

– a checkbox field containing all the answers for that question as choices and the question label as the checkbox field label.

The problem is that if I use this method:
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/acf-load_field/
it will populate the choices for each row, but I need them to be unique on each row.

Is this even possible or is it necessary to already have a unique field for each question in my field group in order to populate the choices uniquely?

Thanks a lot!

• John Huebner

• July 29, 2019 at 10:17 pm

You cannot do this using PHP. To do this you would need to write the values to a JavaScript variable on the page and then use the ACF JS API to populate the values of each row. There are no examples that I know of for this.

• Twansparant

• July 30, 2019 at 7:13 pm

Ok thanks for your reply!

I thought I could use the acf_add_local_field instead for this, so I added the following action that displays my checkboxes correctly now:

add_action('acf/init',	array(&$this, 'addServiceMatchMakerFilter'));
public function addServiceMatchMakerFilter() {
	if (function_exists('acf_add_local_field')) {
		$posts     = new Posts();
		$global    = $posts->getGlobalInfo();
		$questions = $global['match_maker_questions'];

		// Add field for each match maker question
		if (!empty($questions)) {
			foreach ($questions as $question) {
				$choices = [];

				if (!empty($question['choices'])) {
					foreach ($question['choices'] as $choice) {
						$value           = $choice['choice_value'] ? $choice['choice_value'] : $choice['choice_label'];
						$choices[$value] = $choice['choice_label'];
					}
				}

				acf_add_local_field([
					'key'          => 'field_' . uniqid(),
					'label'        => $question['label'],
					'name'         => sanitize_title($question['label']),
					'type'         => 'checkbox',
					'parent'       => 'field_5d3ebbd2fef0c',
					'choices'      => $choices,
					//'layout'       => 'horizontal',
				]);
			}
		}
	}
}

However, when saving my post the values from these fields are empty again (also in frontend). Any idea why this is happening?

Thanks, Toine

• Twansparant

• July 30, 2019 at 11:23 pm

Ah duh! This line messed it up:
'key' => 'field_' . uniqid()

This is different on every page load…
Is there a best practice on how many characters this key should be?