Extending the search context in the admin list post screen

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I have created a custom post type and have attached some custom fields to it. Now I would like to the search that authors can perform on the custom post list screen (in the admin backend) to also be performed on the meta fields and not only look in the title and content as usual.

Where can I hook in and what code I have to use?

Example image
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Stefano

7

I solved filtering the query by adding the join on the postmeta table and changing the where clause.
tips on filtering the WHERE clause (often require regular expression search&replace) are here on codex:

add_filter( 'posts_join', 'segnalazioni_search_join' );
function segnalazioni_search_join ( $join ) {
    global $pagenow, $wpdb;

    // I want the filter only when performing a search on edit page of Custom Post Type named "segnalazioni".
    if ( is_admin() && 'edit.php' === $pagenow && 'segnalazioni' === $_GET['post_type'] && ! empty( $_GET['s'] ) ) {    
        $join .= 'LEFT JOIN ' . $wpdb->postmeta . ' ON ' . $wpdb->posts . '.ID = ' . $wpdb->postmeta . '.post_id ';
    }
    return $join;
}

add_filter( 'posts_where', 'segnalazioni_search_where' );
function segnalazioni_search_where( $where ) {
    global $pagenow, $wpdb;

    // I want the filter only when performing a search on edit page of Custom Post Type named "segnalazioni".
    if ( is_admin() && 'edit.php' === $pagenow && 'segnalazioni' === $_GET['post_type'] && ! empty( $_GET['s'] ) ) {
        $where = preg_replace(
            "/\(\s*" . $wpdb->posts . ".post_title\s+LIKE\s*(\'[^\']+\')\s*\)/",
            "(" . $wpdb->posts . ".post_title LIKE $1) OR (" . $wpdb->postmeta . ".meta_value LIKE $1)", $where );
        $where.= " GROUP BY {$wpdb->posts}.id"; // Solves duplicated results
    }
    return $where;
}

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