Restrict searches to pages that have a particular Custom Field assigned

[Ryan Logan]

Hello. Sorry, I thought I had this figured out. I’d like to restrict searches to pages that have a particular Custom Field assigned. We’re trying to make it so that search only return data from Employee pages. If there is a better way to do it…I’m all ears.

Thank you,
Ryan

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi Ryan,

I suggest creating a “hidden” custom field filter, this is exactly what it’s designed for: http://i.imgur.com/UUgYzC1.png

More info in the documentation.

[Ryan Logan]

Thank you. My fault – let me clarify further what I’m doing.

-I have an employee page named “Tom” and a non-employee page named “Home”.
-Tom has a custom field assigned named “Ajax Search”
-Home does not have a custom field assigned.
-Plugin: not showing/allownig users to change search settings criteria
-Plugin: configured to trigger on a minimum entry of 3 characters
-Plugin: on the General Options tab the only options I have turned on are Search in Pages, Search in Content and Search in Custom Fields > My custom field Ajax Search.

Now, let’s say I do a search for “SEO”. This search shows results for Tom, but also shows results for Home.

We need Home and any other non-employee page to be ignored in search results.

Thanks again,
Ryan

[Ernest Marcinko]

Ok, I see what you need. You want to restrict the results where the “Ajax Search” custom field exists.

That’s a bit harder, but not impossible. I have a solution, which will work with the Regular engine.
Try putting this filtering function to the functions.php file in your active theme directory:

[php]add_filter( ‘asp_cpt_query_add_where’, ‘asp_add_extra_where’, 1, 1 );

function asp_add_extra_where( $query ) {
global $wpdb;
// Change this to the custom field name
$custom_field = "custom_field";

$query .= " AND EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM $wpdb->postmeta as pm
WHERE pm.post_id = $wpdb->posts.ID AND pm.meta_key = ‘$custom_field’)";

return $query;
}[/php]

Change the $custom_field = … variable to the custom field key. This will add an extra paramter to the query to do a very fast check for custom field existence of the the given custom field for the result set.

[Ryan Logan]

Rock-star support! It’s working beautifully. Thank you.

[Ernest Marcinko]

You are welcome! I’m glad it’s working.

I will mark this topic as resolved now. Feel free to open a new one if you have other questions.

If you like the plugin, feel free to rate it on your codecanyon downloads page, it’s greatly appreciated.

[Author]

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