Attachment update action hook?

Thanks for the good words and for your questions.

I am traveling until August 12 and away from my development system, so I am answering this from memory. I can give you some general answers and I am happy to be more specific when I return home.

The best way to detect and act on attachment edits is to use the WordPress hooks provided for those events; MLA uses them and I haven’t seen any reason to provide additional hooks. For example, the attachment_fields_to_edit hook is called before any changes are made, and edit_attachment is called later in the process.

The “associations of categories and tags with attachments” and the MLA-provided Att. Categories and Att. Tags associations are all done with WordPress taxonomies. All of the WordPress functions for accessing and managing the taxonomies will work. You can find a wealth of information in the Codex, starting with Taxonomies.

Moving attachments from one folder to another is much more involved than it first seems. There are lots of references to the directories containing the files scattered throughout the database, and unless you find and update all of them, subtle problems are guaranteed. There are some plugins that do this, but I have stayed away from it in MLA. Be very sure you must do it and be very careful if you proceed.

I will leave this topic unresolved for now. Have a look at the WordPress documentation I suggested and let me know if I can be more specifically helpful. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Thanks for your reply and information! I have since discovered the feature in your plugin that allows you to set the category and tags when the files are uploaded (which is awesome). So I might not need to mess with the hooks if I can get the Custom Upload Directory plugin to work with this.

So my only question now is if I upload a file and assign a category to it, where is that information stored? I searched my entire WordPress database, but couldn’t find it. I found the category in the taxonomy table, but nothing that shows that file #19 is associated with taxonomy #2, if that makes sense.

Thanks for your update and the good news about your progress.

You are much better off using the WordPress API functions to work with taxonomies, not lower-level database access. The link in my first post is a good start, as is this brief tutorial:

Understanding and Working with Taxonomies and Terms in WordPress

You will see there that the term_relationships table relates terms to objects like attachments. The linkage is to the attachment object, not the file it is attached to.

If you want to find the terms assigned to an attachment you can use functions like get_the_terms(). At the bottom of that Codex function reference page are may other similar functions.

If you want to find all the attachments assigned to one or more terms you can use WP_Query and the “taxonomy query”.

The attachment objects are stored in the “posts” table. The attachment ID can be found, for example, in the Media/Assistant submenu table Parent ID column.

You can find the attached file with the get_attached_file() function, but the database is where the action is.

I hope that gives you pointers to the information you need. If you can describe your application goal in more detail I can be more specifically helpful.

Thank you for the information. I was able to output the category of an attachment. So now the only question that remains is how do I put the file I uploaded into a directory named after the category I assigned the file? I tried the code below, but it didn’t work.

add_filter('wp_handle_upload_prefilter', 'cud_pre_upload');
add_filter('wp_handle_upload', 'cud_post_upload');

function cud_pre_upload($file)
{
    if (!empty($file['name']))
    {
        $wp_filetype = wp_check_filetype($file['name']);
        $cud_file_ext = (!empty($wp_filetype['ext'])) ? $wp_filetype['ext'] : '';
        $cud_file_type = (!empty($wp_filetype['type'])) ? $wp_filetype['type'] : '';
    }

    add_filter('upload_dir', 'cud_custom_upload_dir');

    return $file;
}

function cud_post_upload($fileinfo)
{
    remove_filter('upload_dir', 'cud_custom_upload_dir');

    return $fileinfo;
}

function cud_custom_upload_dir($param)
{
    $cat = get_the_category();

    if (!is_array($cat))
        return;

    $npath = '/files/' . $cat->name;
    $param['path'] = $param['path']  . $npath;
    $param['url']  = $param['url'] . $npath;
    $param['basedir'] = $param['basedir'] . $npath;
    $param['baseurl'] = $param['baseurl'] . $npath;

    return $param;
}

Any ideas? Is this even possible?

I am happy to see you are making progress.

As I said in my first response, I have not personally done anything with regard to renaming or moving files around in the upload process. I know there are some plugins that can help. When I get home and have access to my development system I may be able to find some additional information from earlier support topics in this forum. I will let you know if I find anything.

Thanks for your patience. Here are some earlier support topics that include information about renaming or moving files around:

Lightroom mapping Standard and Taxonomy fields

Bulk image name change

Using media Path to populate att. Category

You might also find this plugin useful:

WordPress Flash Uploader

I am marking this topic resolved because the remaining parts of your application are outside the scope of what MLA can do, but please update it if you have any other problems or questions about the MLA functions you are using. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Thanks David. I actually figured this out the other day. Basically what I did was create a hook that runs whenever a post is updated that’s an attachment. The code checks to see if the attachment being updated is in the root of the uploads folder (since that’s where the files are uploaded). If it finds it there it moves it to a category folder (based on whatever attachment category is assigned to it). If no category has been assigned or the file is already in the category folder, it doesn’t do anything. I appreciate your help!

Thanks for your update and the good news about your success. If you have any code that would be of interest to other MLA users with similar goals it would be great to post it here for them to see. Thanks again for your input and your interest in the plugin.