Getting more posts than I should

Just to be clear, the field I’m grabbing from contains a sluggified tag, i.e. I know it’s a proper slug.

Hello, sorry for the late reply..

I tested the [loop] shortcode with both category and tag parameters, and they seem to be working fine on my end. When both are set, the posts that match both queries are returned.

In the latest update, I added some parameters to combine taxonomy queries. Maybe this would work better for you..?

[loop type="post" taxonomy="category" value="cat1,cat2" taxonomy_2="tag" value_2="{FIELD}"]

It should have the same results. Please let me know if you figure something out.

Finally had time to test this out. It does give the same results – too many posts. It’s not surprising though, as it is in essence the same thing, right? As a bit more information, I checked the number of rows it’s returning and it seems it is in fact returning all of the posts from both categories I list, but is not filtering by the tag.

Wait, I figured it out. I double-checked the field name in ACF and I see I had a – instead of a _ in the name. That said, there is a different problem. I loaded a page that should have had a few entries in the table, and instead it displayed my if empty text, but above the table. Here’s my code:

<table>
	<caption>The table caption</caption>
	[pass field="slug_tag"]
		[loop type="post" category="cat1,cat2" tag="{FIELD}"]
		<tr><td>[field title-link]</td></tr>
		[if empty]
			Nothing found.
		[/if]
		[/loop]
	[/pass]
</table>

I’m getting the “Nothing found.” text above the caption of the table. I’m guessing this is due to the lack of TR and TD tags since nothing is returned. I can fix that by adding TR and TD to the text, but it doesn’t explain why nothing is found when I know there are matching posts. Argh.

There’s no way that the tag I pass should not be in slug form, right? I know that these tags are never the same as the slug (because there are characters like : in the actual tags) but the slug is always the right thing to pass, right?

Yes, I believe if you wrap “Nothing found.” in <tr><td> it should display inside the table.

That makes sense that if the tag slug was not exact, there were more posts than expected. If it might help, you can look under Dashboard -> Content to check the available tag slugs.

Something else. I was wondering if the behavior of showing all posts when the fieldname was wrong. Is that really the correct behavior? Should a null answer perhaps show nothing? This was a bit philosophical until I realized it was effecting another table I was creating that uses very similar code to the above, except it is selecting from a different category. When it gets to a record where there is no entry in the field, it is showing all posts in the selected category. In this case it is accessing the correct field, it’s just that the field is empty for that record.

Is there a way to get it to show no results if the tag field is empty?

Hmm, I just tested this – if the tag slug is wrong, it shows no posts, even if the category parameter is also set. If the tag parameter is empty (tag="") then there is no query for tags.

To check if the tag field is empty, it’s possible to wrap the whole thing like..

[if field="slug_tag"]
    ...pass, loop, etc.
[else]
    ...or display nothing
[/if]

That looks good. Now we just need to figure out why a tag I know is correct is returning no results. I carefully made sure the single entry in the slug_tag field was exactly the same as the slug of the tag I want to match, yet I’m now getting no results, which means presumably that there’s a mismatch, but I can’t figure out how that’s possible. Maybe I need to take a look at the tags in the mysql database to see if there is some invisible character or something similar messing things up.

One thing you could try is to loop through the posts without filtering by tag, and display their tag slugs with [taxonomy tag]. Then you can see what slugs are available for query. Another thing I just thought of, perhaps you can display the result of {FIELD} to make sure the right value is being passed to the parameter.