Problems with Local JSON

• semrocc

• February 29, 2024 at 5:24 pm

Hi there, it seems that after changes made in ACF 6.2, I have just discovered some problems with the Local JSON feature.

In a plugin, I’m using the following code to save and read the JSON file in a specific folder:

add_filter('acf/settings/save_json', 'my_acf_json_save_point');
 
function my_acf_json_save_point( $path ) {

	// update path
	$path = '/path-to/wp-content/local-acf-json'; 
	
	// return
	return $path;
}

add_filter('acf/settings/load_json', 'my_acf_json_load_point');

function my_acf_json_load_point( $paths ) {

	// remove original path (optional)
	unset($paths[0]);

	// append path
	$paths[] = '/path-to/wp-content/local-acf-json';

	// return
	return $paths;
}

Up until recently, this worked great without problems. Now, after making a change to a field in the admin, I discovered that the change never happened on the edit page where the ACF field is. The ACF group shows that the field was saved.

Digging further, I noticed that the JSON file is being saved in a different format as below:

New:
02_29_24_2b7b8a18647347e1b5f70053453b6cef.json

Old:
group_561aac73063f3.json

After doing some testing, it seems that the new JSON field has the correct information, but for some reason it is being read from the old JSON file. I have also noticed that the JSON files are created new if the save happens on a different day.

I did some reading in the DOCs and it shows the following code to change the JSON file name, though I did try this and it didn’t work for me, unfortunatley.

function custom_acf_json_filename( $filename, $post, $load_path ) {
    $filename = str_replace(
        array(
            ' ',
            '_',
        ),
        array(
            '-',
            '-'
        ),
        $post['title']
    );

    $filename = strtolower( $filename ) . '.json';

    return $filename;
}
add_filter( 'acf/json/save_file_name', 'custom_acf_json_filename', 10, 3 );

Any help on getting this back running properly would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

• semrocc

• March 3, 2024 at 4:29 pm

If anyone else comes across a similar issue, the problem was that ACF now runs the WordPress sanitize_file_name() function on the JSON file names before saving them. That being said, I was using a different function that uses sanitize_file_name() to rename image files.

The fix was to write a condition into my existing function:

function image_hash_rename( $filename ) {
	$info = pathinfo( $filename );
	$ext  = empty( $info['extension'] ) ? '' : '.' . $info['extension'];

	if ( '.json' === $ext ) { // output ACF JSON files in correct format
	return $filename;
	}

	$name = basename( $filename, $ext );    
	$hash = md5( $name );
    return date('m_d_y') . '_' . $hash . $ext;
}
add_filter( 'sanitize_file_name', 'image_hash_rename', 10 );

After doing so, the JSON files are now being saved in the correct format and I was able to sync with them again.

Thanks to Matt Shaw (WP Engine Support) for working through this with me and create a solution that worked.