What does the Repeater value stored in the DB represent?

• ainsleyclark

• January 11, 2021 at 5:48 am

Hi there,

I’m just wondering what the repeater values (not children) represent in the database?
Is it a count of how many fields there are for that particular repeater?

https://ibb.co/5rpW7Vs

I have attached an image of a simple repeater with a text field, the field marked ‘repeater’ with the value of 2 is what I am asking about.

Many thanks.

• John Huebner

• January 12, 2021 at 4:49 am

The value stored for the repeater is the number of rows it contains.

• ainsleyclark

• January 12, 2021 at 5:09 am

Thanks for your reply,

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why ACF needs this count? And where is it used?

Many thanks.

• John Huebner

• January 12, 2021 at 5:36 am

So that it knows how many rows to get from the db. The sub field names are derived in a loop something like

foreach ($i=0; $i<$rows; $i++) {
  $sub_field_meta_key = $repeater_name.'_'.$i.'_'.$sub_field_name;
}

It’s not exactly that, the example is extremely simplified.