Dear god is there an easier way? to get the attachment ID?

  • Resolved Zane Matthew

    (@zanematthew)


    14 years, 1 month ago

    Right next to my post I would like to have a “About this featured image section” which in short pulls in the data using
    wp_get_attachment_metadata its cake on a page like image.php where the attachment_id is in $_GET, But i’m trying to do this on my single-post.php page. Below is my working code:

    global $post;
        global $wpdb;

        $query = "
        SELECT ID
        FROM $wpdb->posts
        WHERE post_parent = '$post->ID'
        AND post_status = 'inherit'
        AND post_type='attachment'
        ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 1";

        $attachment_id = $wpdb->get_var($query);
        $url = get_attachment_link($attachment_id);
        $urlArray = parse_url($url);
        $queryStringArray = explode('=', $urlArray['query']);
        $attachment_id = $queryStringArray[1];

        // assign some info
        $meta_array = wp_get_attachment_metadata($attachment_id);

    It works it gives me an array of attachment metadata, but I feel like i went the long way around the bush with this one. Any help on using some of the built in functions in wordpress to clean this up?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • For image.php or attachment.php, you can use $post->ID, $id, or I guess $wp_query->get_queried_object_id() would do as well.

    You want to avoid $_GET — what if pretty permalinks are enabled? You’ll also want to avoid direct queries if at all possible. A theme should never make a direct query, ever, because they should never need to.

    For single.php, you’ll want to use get_children(), such as this (untested):

    $attachment = get_children(
   array( 'post_parent' => $post->ID, 'post_type' => 'attachment',
      'post_mime_type' => 'image', 'numberposts' => 1 ) );
if ( count( $attachment ) )
   $metadata = wp_get_attachment_metadata( $attachment[0]->ID );

    Nacin

    Thread Starter Zane Matthew

    (@zanematthew)

    Thanks that did exactly what i wanted, except for one small issue. I’ve read about get_children, but over looked it cause I’m not intimidated about running queries, but given best practices, I’ll stay away from them.

    The one issue i had was that I had to do an array_shift on the result from $attachment due to the result being something like this

    Array
(
    [351] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 351
            [post_author] => 2
            [post_date] => 2010-09-05 22:12:34
            [post_date_gmt] => 2010-09-05 22:12:34

    It’s not about queries being intimating, it’s about them being un-cacheable. get_children() relies on the post caches. Direct queries are also not backwards compatible — some people got caught by surprise when we added the ‘trash’ post status, for example.

    I didn’t check to see how get_children() returned data before writing the snippet. It returns an array keyed by the post ID. So yes, you’ll need to do an array_shift(). By default, it is an array of objects, so you’ll then want $attachment->ID.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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