Retrieve custom submission data

Hi Paul, thank you for your patience.

Can you let me know which way you’re showing the submissions on the frontend? I’m trying to track down the most appropriate spot to potentially filter for this.

Also note that I believe only limited people can see a lot of the submissions on the frontend, based on who is set to be able to manage them. I don’t believe the submissions show like a standard single post or single post type.

Hi Michael, thanks for the note. I have a small number of achievements, 8, that I have displayed manually on a page. Under each, I want to present the user some of the custom data that I’m using ACF to store with their submission. To retrieve this for a particular user, I need to be able to return the ID of the submission for that user tied to that achievement. In wp-admin, when viewing submissions, I see the ID for the achievement that the submission is tied to, I need to be able to do the opposite in my front-end template.

In this case, I’m not currently returning any of the default submission data, I just want the ID of the user’s submission tied to a particular achievement so I can use ACF to query the custom data.

Does that help clarify?

Does help a fair amount. Looks like we don’t have any ready-made functionality for retrieving the submission ID though. So that begs the question of how comfortable are you with coding/customization? I could help construct a way to get that ID and whatnot, but it will involve some code and custom functions.

Hi Michael, I’m very comfortable with custom functions. I regularly break into plugins and spin off custom versions of functions and shortcodes to better suit my needs. Let me know how I can help, your efforts are most appreciated.

Once wrapped up I’ll share this with the community, along with the ACF custom data tie-in I have set up, as there are some really powerful things you can do with this setup (for this example we’ve set up a grading scale for submissions, tied to a custom “assignment” achievement type, which is really useful for academic purposes).

This should help out. Pass in the post ID for the achievement, and it should return the submission ID it’s associated with.

function custom_get_submission_id_by_achievement_id( $post_id = 0 ) {
	global $wpdb;

	$query = "SELECT post_id
			FROM $wpdb->postmeta
			WHERE meta_key = '_badgeos_submission_achievement_id'
			AND meta_value = '%s'
			";
	$prepared_query = $wpdb->prepare( $query, absint( $post_id ) );
	$results = $wpdb->get_col( $prepared_query );

	if ( !empty( $results ) ) {
		return absint( $results[0] );
	}

	return '';
}

Don’t forget to check for empty() in case it doesn’t find one, though it should.

Hi Michael, this is really close. I have it set up and and I’m able to retrieve submission IDs tied to particular achievements. However, it’s not tied to particular users. Here’s an example:

I have an achievement (ID=344) and 2 subscribers, userA and userB. userA has submitted an submission to achievement 344 but userB has not. Using the function above, when logged in as userA and I’m able to retrieve submission data as expected. However, userB is seeing the same data, even though they haven’t submitted anything to achievement 344 yet.

Is there a way to constrain this such that the submission ID returned is only for the logged in user’s ID?

Thanks!

Well, each submission is its own post in a post type. The only real way things are tied to the post type is by the fore-mentioned meta value. However, unless I’m mistaken, the submitting user is also listed as the author. So, with that, you have the ability to fetch the user who submitted a given submission, as well as the current user ID. I would recommend doing an if statement to compare those two values and only display something if they match OR the current user is an admin(like yourself).

Just some quick followup thoughts for you.