laymonk

To anyone reading this, I discovered the database tables being used:

The form submissions are treated as a post type called elementor_cf_db … so, wp_posts and wp_postmeta hold the data.

Sadly the actual form data is stored in a horribly huge serialized string in wp_postmeta: in meta_value of a meta_key named sb_elem_cfd.

This is a huge serialized string with all elements of elementor page display and even all data elements (including all select options of the form) within this one serialized field. YIKES!!!!

There is absolutely no practical way of querying this from SQL. PHP may offer more options to unserialize and parse this data.

Elementor now has a beta feature for submissions that does arguably a better job … and it needs to be enabled in Elementor settings. However, I suspect getting at it’s database tables data will present similar challenges, but at least Elementor’s beta submissions allow easy bulk export of all submitted data.

Best of all, the plugin Form Vibes is excellent for this. Like the other 2 already mentioned, it autodetects the submissions (and won’t see already made submissions). It excels in having the data in 2 custom mysql tables that are easy to query from SQL.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by laymonk.

Thanks again, Konrad …

I think I will be using acf_log() all the time now.

Looking forward to reading your article.

Million thanks for the speedy response, as usual, Konrad … and your suggestion helped me track down the issue.

acf_log is a most useful function to know about … and it tells me that the fields (which are taxonomy terms) are returning an array of the entire taxonomy referenced instead of the individual term selected.

Like:

(
    [0] => Term-1
    [1] => Term-2
)

I configured the field to return the taxonomy term selected, and ticked both ‘Save Terms’ & ‘Load Terms’.

Well, I unchecked ‘Load Terms’ and the problem went away. Apparently, ‘Load Terms’ load the entire taxonomy terms and I never realized that. DOH!!!

For what it’s worth, both ACF Pro & ACFE are the current stable versions

Thanks for chipping in your feedback here, Konrad.

Hopefully, that provides enough insight to help isolate the issues …

Not just the color panel, also affects dynamic content selection popups … some would appear behind the panel (in a manner that is almost impossible to use), and others just would not show. Affects multiple elementor widgets from different authors.

Very easily demonstrable by deactivating this plugin, and it took me a while to track down to this plugin.

Konrad, million thanks for your efforts and for spotting those issues. I am sure the plugin author will appreciate. I am glad I mentioned it here.

Thanks a million for being on the ball as usual, Konrad.

In my own case, the documents I have added to document embedder are all also used within ACF field groups that are connected to ACF-E forms … and I wondered whether that was the reason. Seems not, since you reproduced it probably without being setup that way.

Also, as part of the conflict with document embedder, I found that cloned subfields of field-type text could not be edited within ACF-E forms (and also even in the backend).

Thanks a million for responding … Hoping for a solution asap.

Thanks again for your awesome plugin and immense support of it … I hear you loud and clear on all you have said. I will vote for links in the UI to the specific docs pages in your documentation site.

Having said that, I now find a show-stopping conflict with a plugin I cannot avoid using. I will create a new issue for that.

It’s working for me with Elementor installed. So, there must be something else creating the conflict for you.

Hi,

Sorry I have not come back here on this topic. I got dragged into other things and have not looked at it more.

I was also put off by realising that there were already quite a few users in the system, and making the groups work was going to involve a ton of manual work:

• First to associate the private groups 1-by-1 to almost a hundred groups. YIKES!
• Then to associate each user of more than a hundred users to one or more private groups. YIKES!

The ‘User Management’ section is a nice feature, but only filters by private group’s groups (the roles filter doesn’t really work, and wouldn’t have been that useful anyways … not as much as other user meta fields that mirror the private groups’ names), and that didn’t help me at all in the end.

In the end, I began to doubt this is a practical solution for my use case. Without a way to manually or easily map forum groups to private groups, and users to private groups, I just don’t see it as a solution.

I also peered at the DB to see if I could figure out a pattern, so I could address it with sql or php, but because it doesn’t have it’s own custom tables I knew it was going to be more work and time than I was willing to give it.

Konrad, Million thanks for the most helpful information. Definitely sets me straight on how this is supposed to work.

And I can confirm that this is working perfectly.

Thanks for sharing the slack link too … had a weird problem where the media library will display blank on attempting to select images for image / gallery fields … lasted a couple of hours but it suddenly started working again, so it’s probably nothing to do with ACF-E.

And please please, don’t get rid of that ‘Code section’, without it I would not have delved deeper and figured out the immense usefulness of your plugin. I reckon it’s arguably one of the best selling feature.

The concept of support is only a backend presentation thing, in the sense that those taxonomies show up in backend entry forms for the custom post type … but there is no real linkage as such.

To create a link, you don’t just need a field group … you need to define a field of type ‘taxonomy’ within that field group, and in that field’s definition you choose the taxonomy you want it to link to.

See acf docs on taxonomy field type: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/taxonomy/

Your back-end filters should work exactly the same way in ACF-Extended front-end forms as long as the field group is connected to the form during definition.