Query by Repeater row subfield checkbox

• thepaperplant

• February 15, 2019 at 8:11 am

Been searching for an answer to this. I have a custom post type called “artist” and in there I have a repeater field called “video”. I have a checkbox subfield of video called “tag”.

How would I query all artist posts that have the tag subfield value of “featured”?

• rdm

• February 20, 2019 at 10:50 am

Personally, I use $wpdb to query repeater fields. This might not be the best way (you might want to use wp_cache_set/wp_cache_get if this turns into a performance issue), but it works for me.

If I understand your situation properly, I imagine something like this (warning, untested code):

global $wpdb;
return $wpdb->get_col("SELECT DISTINCT post_id FROM wp_postmeta m INNER JOIN wp_posts p ON m.post_id = p.id AND p.post_type='artist' WHERE m.meta_key LIKE 'video\_%\_tag' AND m.meta_value='featured'");

If I am not mistaken about your setup, this would return a list of artist post ids where any of the tags in your video repeater is set to ‘featured’.

Note that, as written, this would return both published and unpublished posts. If you wanted just published posts you’d need to add that constraint to the query (in the where clause, something like: AND p.post_type=’publish’).

• rdm

• February 20, 2019 at 12:27 pm

Or wait wait wait… did you mean “tag” like the wordpress taxonomy? Because, if so, that’s a completely different query.

I suppose some cautions are in order:

*) never cache if you can’t measure the difference in performance (you won’t know if you are making things better or worse).

*) writing code for a wordpress theme tends to be different from writing code for a wordpress plugin.

*) if you’re doing this on a “multisite” (or have a strange configuration) that would also change the details of the query.

*) the code snippet I posted was intended to be in the body of a php function.

*) if you need this to be a part of the $wp_query, that introduces other issues (including things like the url structure that this fits into).

Anyways, if this doesn’t work, I would have to ask you for more information about what specifically you’re doing.

(And, if you’re using wordpress ‘tags’ (also known as the ‘term’ taxonomy), then maybe you should be doing some other things different. Like maybe it makes sense to have a video custom post type and have the tags on the videos rather than buried deep in the artist description?)