Select random custom field from nested repeater

• studio1337

• December 30, 2015 at 9:22 am

I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to make this work. I have a repeater field and a nested repeater within it. I’m trying to extract a random entry from the nested repeater, but I can’t even pull the nested entries into an array. I’ve tried dozens of code configurations, but I’ll post my latest here:

<?php if( have_rows('section_content') ): //repeater nested inside another repeater
	$rows = get_sub_field('content_option'); //this just fails
	print_r($rows); //returns nothing
endif; ?>

Once I’m able to pull valid data, I’ll shuffle the rows and only return the first one.

I read somewhere in another post that you can’t create an array using sub field functions. If this is the case, then I can understand why the above fails. But I’m not sure what to try instead.

If it matters, the content inside ‘content_option’ will need to run through the_content filter and has shortcodes that need to run as well. If I can get an array to print, I can probably take it from there. Any help would be most appreciated!

• studio1337

• December 31, 2015 at 6:58 am

So, I ended up doing this:

<?php if( have_rows('section_content') ):
	$rows = array();
	$i = 0;
	while ( have_rows('section_content') ):
		the_row();
		$rows[$i] = get_sub_field('content_option');
		$i++;
	endwhile;
	$i = mt_rand(0,count($rows)-1);
	echo $rows[$i];
else:
	// some other stuff
endif; ?>

Hackfest 2015! But at least I’m getting the results I need. I’m guessing this isn’t very efficient, but I’m going to end up putting caching on this, and we’re talking about a very small audience (maybe 1000 visitors per month across 6 sites). So I think it will end up working out fine.

Still, I would love it if there’s a more native way to do what I’m doing, where I just pull one result, instead of pulling all of them and then selecting one from an array. It feels dirty…

• James

• January 7, 2016 at 6:52 pm

Hi @studio1337,

You can always get the repeater content using get_field() function. You can see the content of the repeater field using a code like this:

print_r(get_field('section_content'));

This way you can generate a random number as the index of the returned array.

I hope this makes sense.