Programmatically Creating Records Containing a Repeater

• Neil

• March 29, 2019 at 2:28 am

I have a custom post type that has a field group associated with it. One of the fields is a repeater. I set up a form on the site so end-users could submit and populate this custom post type in the back-end.

I am doing this by first creating a post using $post_id = wp_insert_post($lo, false); and then populating fields using

if ($post_id > 0) {
 add_post_meta($post_id, 'first_name', $_POST['firstName']);
 ...
 ...

For the repeater, I read in the documentation to use add_row() so I tried the following with no luck. In my form, I have the option to add 4 social links using
a dropdown select named social_network[] containing values like Facebook, Instagram, etc and a social_network_url[] containing the corresponding Facebook or Instagram URL

if ( count($social_network) > 0 && count($social_network_url) > 0 ) {
      foreach ($social_network as $key => $value) {

        $link = array(
        	'social_network'=> $value,
        	'url'	=> $social_network_url[$key]
        );
        add_row('social_media_Links', $link, $post_id);
      }
    }

The $social_network and $social_network_url variables come from

  $social_network = $_POST['social_network'];

  $social_network_url=array_filter($_POST['social_network_url'],function( $item ){
    return !is_null( $item ) && !empty( $item ) && strlen( trim( $item ) ) > 0 && $item!='';
  });

• John Huebner

• March 29, 2019 at 7:00 am

Using add_post_meta() will only work with an ACF field if it is a simple type of field. This means anything listed under “Basic” field types. You should be using update_field() and using the field key to update all ACF fields, as explained here https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/update_field/ to ensure that the fields are created correctly.

Adding content to a repeater can be done the same way. Let say for example that the field key of the repeater is “field_1”, and the sub fields are “field_2” for network and “field_3” for url.

// construct an array for the repeater value
$value = array(
  // each row is a nested array
  array(
    // row 1
    // each row contains field key => value pairs for the fields
    'field_2' => 'name of network',
    'field_3' => 'url value'
  ),
  array(
    // row 2
    'field_2' => 'name of network',
    'field_3' => 'url value'
  ),
  // etc for each row
);
// update the repeater
update_field('field_1', $value, $post_id);