Programmatically adding layouts to a flexible content field

• bandv

• May 2, 2018 at 6:58 pm

Hi All

I have seen similar topics on the forums to do what I am trying to do but nothing quite right so I am hoping you guys can help me out.

I am developing a base theme that we can use as a basis for our projects that relies on having re-usable layouts that can be added to an ACF field group and used throughout the sites.

What I want to be able to do is select one of my layouts from a dropdown, then select the field group, and field within that field group that I want to install that layout to, it will then grab all the information that I have stored in an array for that layout, and add it as an available layout of the ACF field. I hope that makes sense!

I can’t find any documentation on how to actually programatically add a layout to an existing field in ACF. I did find something on another topic that mentioned something like this:

$field_data = acf_get_field($field);

$key = uniqid();

$field_data['layouts'][$key] = array(
	'display' => 'block',
	'key' => $key,
	'label' => 'Test',
	'max' => '',
	'min' => '',
	'name' => 'test',
	'sub_fields' => array()
);

acf_remove_local_field($field);
acf_add_local_field($field_data);

However this doesn’t seem to do anything. I suspect this is something to do with the local_field part? It is worth noting that these fields are not adding using PHP in the functions file, they are added using the admin interface then cached into the acf-json files.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!!

Many thanks
David

• bandv

• May 5, 2018 at 12:38 am

I am still working on this and am slowly progressing forward, I have now managed to get it to add the layout using the following code:

$field_data = acf_get_field($field);

$key = uniqid();

$field_data['layouts'][$key] = array(
	'display' => 'block',
	'key' => $key,
	'label' => 'Test',
	'max' => '',
	'min' => '',
	'name' => 'test',
	'sub_fields' => $sub_fields
);
acf_update_field($field_data);

The problem is, no matter what I pass as the sub_fields, they get stripped out by the update_field method on the flexible content plugin before the save is called on line 1334:

function update_field( $field ) {
		
		// loop
		if( !empty($field['layouts']) ) {
			
			foreach( $field['layouts'] as &$layout ) {
		
				unset($layout['sub_fields']);
				
			}
			
		}
		
		
		// return		
		return $field;
	}

I am not quite sure why this would be? Is there a way that I can re-add the sub_fields to the layout afterwards?

A note to anyone else that stumbles upon this, using acf_update_field does not refresh the cached version in the acf-json folder so you need to remove those files if you want to use this method.

Any input would be greatly appreciated!!

All the best
David