Sort Repeater Field by Subfield in Admin (Backend)

• youllbejustfine

• March 16, 2016 at 1:07 pm

I’m trying to sort a Repeater field in the backend, following the documentation in the “Advanced” section, and using the acf/load_value filter.

My issue is that the $value returned is just the number of rows (I have 3 rows, so it returns string(1) “3”), and not an array, which is what the documentation seems to suggest. There isn’t any sub-field data/object revealed here, so the foreach() doesn’t get supplied a proper argument (it’s not an array).

My code is as follows:

function my_acf_load_value( $value, $post_id, $field ) {
// vars
$order = array();

// populate order
foreach( $value as $i => $row ) {

$order[ $i ] = $row['field_56e832f858a11'];

}

// multisort
array_multisort( $order, SORT_DESC, $value );

// return
return $value;
}
add_filter('acf/load_value/name=fall_term', 'my_acf_load_value', 10, 3);

I will eventually want to sort by DatePicker, but for now am just trying to get it to sort by a Number.

Any idea what I am missing here?

• James

• March 16, 2016 at 3:16 pm

Hi @youllbejustfine

I’m afraid I couldn’t reproduce the issue on my end. The $value variable will return 0 if there’s no entries in the repeater. For such case, you need to check it first like this:

if( empty($value) ) {
    return $value;
}

Did you create the repeater field from other field types such as text? Do you have a same field key or name assigned to the page? Could you please share the JSON or XML export of your field group?

Thanks.

• MarcGuay

• November 3, 2016 at 6:43 am

I just ran into a similar problem and concluded, without any evidence, that it’s because the repeater field is a subfield of another repeater field. Perhaps this is the case here as well.

• MarcGuay

• November 4, 2016 at 2:27 am

Actually it seems like the parent repeater field simply returns the number of subfields as well, no idea why it doesn’t work as described. I’m using ACF v4.4.8 w/ Repeater field add-on v1.1.1.

• James

• November 7, 2016 at 2:13 pm

Hi @marcguay

I’m afraid the acf/load_value filter will always return the number of total row instead of the array for the Repeater add-on and ACF free version.

Because you have the Repeater add-on, you should be able to claim the ACF PRO Personal license. This page should give you more idea about it: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/upgrading-v4-v5/#how-to update. I suggest you use the PRO version instead.

If you still want to use the Repeater add-on, then please use the basic code instead of the advanced code.

I hope this helps 🙂

• MarcGuay

• November 7, 2016 at 11:47 pm

Thanks James. Perhaps a note in the docs would be helpful to others in the same situation.