Searching by taxonomy custom field

• stueynet

• November 8, 2013 at 2:41 pm

Prepare to have your minds blown.

I have a post type called retailers that uses a custom field called manufacturers. Manufacturers is a ‘Taxonomy’ custom field. However it does not assign taxonomies to the retailer itself. The Manufacturers taxonomy is a taxonomy attached to Products. I cannot share the taxonomy for many technical reasons but if I can get this to work I do not need to.

So… A Product has a single Manufacturer. A Retailer can have many Manufacturers. On the products page, I grab the manufacturer as it is one of the product taxonomies. I then need to show which Retailers carry that manufacturer. Normally one would just do:

		$args = array(
			'post_type' => 'retailers',
			'meta_key' => 'manufacturers',
			'meta_value' => $manufacturer
		);
    $retailers_query = new WP_Query($args);

However that wont work because each retailer has multiple Manufacturers and ACF stores them as a serialized array in the post meta table as follows:

meta_key: manufacturers
meta_value: a:5:{i:0;s:2:"21";i:1;s:2:"44";i:2;s:2:"23";i:3;s:2:"24";i:4;s:2:"16";}

So when running the query above will obviously not work. Any thoughts how I could do a query, that looks through a custom post type that uses the taxonomy field from ACF?

Thanks in advance.

• stueynet

• November 8, 2013 at 3:34 pm

Solved it. Here is how:

$myrows = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'manufacturers' AND meta_value LIKE '%$manufacturer_id%'" );
	
foreach($myrows as $row){
  $retailer_ids[] = $row->post_id;
}

Then run a WP_query with the post ids

$args = array(
  'post_type' => 'where',
  'post__in' => $retailer_ids
);
$retailers_query = new WP_Query($args);

The only reason I can see this having issues is if one of the serialized pointers is the same as a manufacturer ID. But there are ways to start them high so this workaround should be good for now.

• Elliot

• November 9, 2013 at 10:22 am

Hi @stueynet

I would advise that you checkout the relationship field documentation. It too saves an array of IDs as the value.

In the docs you will find an article which talks about a get_posts query using a LIKE search to find selected posts.

You can use the same technique to load posts with a selected term.

Thanks
E