Company search for NACE codes

[VlastaParticipant]

Dear Ernest,
I set up a website for our institution that has as its main task the search for specific companies (suppliers) according to different criteria (name, sector, location, etc.). For the construction of the website I use WordPress with the topic AVADA. So I give each registered company a portfolio page and in these individual pages then I use Categories for e.g. to define its branch, custom fields for its location, skills and tags for other parameters / criteria, etc. for later search.
But now I got the task that there should be a search of the companies for so-called NACE codes (please see: https://www.euregiolocator.eu/downloads/NACE-Codes.pdf).
This means that every company we have in the list on our website can have several of these NACE codes (eg company “X” has: 13.56.8; 13.57.9; 14.98.3 and company “Y” has eg: 24.35.9 33.87.1, 42.76.5 etc.). If the visitor of our website now enters a number in this format in the search, the company with these NACE codes should be shown as the result. I have two questions about this:
1.) In which field (Skill, Tag, Custom Field, etc.) in the AVADA portfolio should I enter from your experience such NACE codes, so that they can be easily and good filtered and found later by AJAX Search Pro?
2.) Do you have a special recommendation on how to organize such a search, so that if you do not write out all the numbers (eg only the first two or three), the system will list the companies that have these first numbers as NACE code?
Thank you in advance for your support and best regards,
Vlasta

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi Vlasta,

I am not sure how these avada fields are stored. You have multiple good viable options:

Custom fields
It might be more beneficial to create a new custom field – perhaps using ACF – instead of using existing ones.
If a company can have more than one NACE code assigned, then using ACF is probably a good idea, as it supports checkbox/multiselect fields to allow entering more than one value – that the search can later use within a filter.

Taxonomy Terms
This is another good option, it might save some database space as well. Taxonomies can be created via 3rd party plugins, or using custom codes, depending on the use case.
The main advantage over custom fields is, that each taxonomy term is a separate object, having a separate ID and label. In this case, for exaple if multiple companies will use the same NACE codes, then it does not have to be stored multiple times within the database, saving some space. It is the same thing as post categories, where a category can be assigned to multiple posts.

If you are planning to use the NACE codes as search filters, then the taxonomy terms solution is much better.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
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[VlastaParticipant]

Hi Ernest,

great, thank you for your advice and support!
I will try these then and see how it looks like.

Best regards and a nice weekend,

Vlasta

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