How to search CPT’s by meta query from the admin dashboard?

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I feel like I’m missing something really obvious, but I’ve looked and can’t figure this out. I have a CPT (request_form) and I need to perform searches on meta queries (wp_postmeta) rather than the post title. The catch is I need to do this from the admin dashboard and my code isn’t working. I’ve done similar kinds of searches on the user side, but not the admin side before. I figured pre_get_posts was the right hook to use, but I’m getting nowhere.

Two strange things I noticed.

  1. meta_query is present twice in the $query object. Once at $query->query_vars['meta_query'] and once at $query->meta_query.

  2. When I enable SAVEQUERIES in wp-config.php and dump $wpdb->queries, I don’t see my query being executed at all.

    function my_search($query) {
  if (!is_admin()) {
    return;
  }

 if ($query->query['post_type'] !== 'request_form') {
   return;
 }

 if (!$query->is_search) {
  return $query;
 }

 $search = $query->query_vars['s'];

 $meta_query = array(
    'relation' => 'OR',
    array(
      'key' => 'request_details',
      'value' => $search,
      'compare' => 'LIKE'
    ),
    array(
      'key' => 'request_subject',
      'value' => $search,
      'compare' => 'LIKE'
    )
  );

  $query->set('meta_query', $meta_query);
  echo "<pre>";
  var_dump($query);
  echo "</pre>";

  return $query;
}
add_action('pre_get_posts', 'my_search');

If I query directly in the db using sequelpro with the follwing, I get back exactly the posts I expect (sorry, I know this isn’t exactly the same).

SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_value LIKE "%basketball%"

Thanks for any help you can give!

1 Answer
1

You can install the Query Monitor plugin to see what actual query that is being executed when you perform a search.

I suspect the problem you are having is that you are not unsetting the initial query vars. You are adding the meta query, but you haven’t removed the s= parameter, which only searches for your keyword in the title, content and excerpt.

Below $query->set('meta_query', $meta_query);, try adding either of these: $query->set('s', ''); to set ‘s’ to an empty string or $query->__unset('s'); to unset it.

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