@jaakko yes indeed, that is one workaround, but it is definitely not ideal.
The way that ACF is engineered right now doesn’t give the required context to build really good custom ACF Blocks, it would be great if this could be considered for a future release.
@hube2 I was thinking the same thing about using pure WP DB stuff to do the update for any Advanced Custom Fields. But of course I’d love it just to do this out the box 😉
However, like I said, I can update the fields programatically very successfully! So I’m not quite sure why the wp-admin doesn’t do the same thing and avoid the slow update_metadata function. By maybe there is something more complex that I’m not really understanding!
I agree that ACF is absolutely brilliant and powerful. I’ve build really complex UIs using it. This is the first true limitation I’ve encountered.
@hube2 Thanks for your suggestions. I think allowing the scripts to run for longer for a specific post type is a decent approach given how it works now, but i worry how it might affect DB and general server performance if it is taking 10s of minutes to run. Do you know if ACF Pro might resolve the above issues…. I’ve read about Local JSON and more advanced JSON read/write functionality, and I wondered if this might help?
It seems a shame that ACF isn’t able to deal with the case of a large set of fields. I’d be interested to know what @elliot thinks of this and whether it would be possible to improve the update mechanisms here. After a while the whole page just becomes unmanageable as nothing is able to be updated. Even if there were 4500 or so fields on the page, doing an update of 4500 rows of a database shouldn’t take that long?! But there are clearly optimisations that could be made here. i.e. why update anything if it hasn’t changed?
Is there another approach that perhaps we’re not thinking about here?
+1 This would be great to have as part of the core. It would save us having to write our own custom field type which is a bit time intensive when all you want to do is be able to reuse a collection of fields.
