What does the_row() return?

• Will

• February 12, 2014 at 6:23 am

I have a repeater named resources with 8 fields. The first field is a radio field with three options. Depending on your choice, a subset of the remaining 7 fields are shown. For context, these are resources for a non-profit web site and may include links to internal pages/posts/cpt (via relationship field), external links (text field) or internal documents (file field). On my template, I loop through the rows and need to switch the HTML output (and sub_field() calls) depending on what type of content it is, as indicated by the radio field value.

The radio field, called “resource-type” has these values

internal : Internal Link
external : External Resource
doc : Document

In my test content I have 4 rows:

1. Row 1: “internal” with 4 relationship objects selected
2. Row 2: “external” with a text url
3. Row 3: “doc” pointing a PDF in the library
4. Row 4: “internal” with a related single post

This code, outputs what I would expect:

Code

<?php
if( have_rows('resources') ):
 
	while ( have_rows('resources') ) : the_row();

		$type = get_sub_field('resource_type');
		echo "<h3>Type: " .  $type . " </h3>";
	
	endwhile;
endif;				
?>

OUTPUT

Type: internal
Type: external
Type: doc
Type: internal 

But, after reading “The the_row function also returns the row data as an array if you wish to store it as a variable and use it.” on http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/functions/have_rows/#notes I thought that this would output the same thing:

<?php
if( have_rows('resources') ):
 
	while ( have_rows('resources') ) : the_row();

		$row = the_row();
		$type = $row['resource_type'];
		echo "<h3>Type: " .  $type . " </h3>";
	
	endwhile;
endif;				
?>

But it’s only outputting:

Type: external
Type: internal 

What am I missing?

• Elliot

• February 12, 2014 at 4:22 pm

Hi @Will

The issue is that you are using the_row twice within the loop!

Only use it once per loop like so:

<?php
if( have_rows('resources') ):
 
	while ( have_rows('resources') ) : $row = the_row();

		$type = $row['resource_type'];
		echo "<h3>Type: " .  $type . " </h3>";
	
	endwhile;
endif;				
?>

Thanks
E

• Will

• February 13, 2014 at 4:15 am

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! THANK YOU!

Makes total sense – it was getting the next row each time so it only echoed the 2nd and 4th items.

• davidcie

• December 18, 2016 at 9:59 am

Just in case someone stumbles across this in 2017 onwards: it turns out that contrary to what is stated in the docs for get_row() and the_row(), both functions return arrays keyed by field internal names and not field user defined names. So you will get:

Array
(
    [field_5855ac26cb153] => 'John'
    [field_5855ac26cb154] => 'Smith'
    [field_5855ac26cb155] => 31
)

…instead of:

Array
(
    [name] => 'John'
    [surname] => 'Smith'
    [age] => 31
)

…as the docs would have you believe. This makes both functions more or less useless for the end user. It has been raised with support back in September that either both functions should return arrays keyed by field names or the docs should be changed as they are misleading. Neither has been done.

• fatsoma

• March 17, 2017 at 4:59 am

As an update to the previous comment since 5.3.3 of ACF Pro you can pass a true bool to the_row / get_row i.e. the_row(true)

This will output your keynames as expected and originally explained in previous comments

This is explained in the docs found here: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/get_row/

cc @davidcie

• davidcie

• March 17, 2017 at 5:20 am

@fatsoma thanks for the update! This definitely fixes one of my ACF pet peeves.

The docs are still incorrect thou. The code example should say $row = get_row(TRUE); rather than $row = get_row(); because $format_values defaults to FALSE.