[Resolved] Displaying Term Meta Fields on a View

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[Timothy]

Hi,

I have a cpt "Books" with a taxonomy "Book Categories" and have created a View displaying the Books with the taxonomy filter to create my Book Search page which is working fine:

hidden link

With some custom js I've manage to also output the name of the selected Book Category above the search results. I'd also like to output some Book Category term meta fields that I created, but after searching of support tickets I cannot find a solution.

I thought I could create a View displaying the Book Category Taxonomy and with the query filter "Terms with ID set by the shortcode attribute" then place this view within the Book View and somehow grab the taxonomy ID of the selected taxonomy of the filter... Is this possible?

I already can grab the name of the taxonomy so maybe I could get the ID from the name?

Tim

[Christian Cox]

I thought I could create a View displaying the Book Category Taxonomy and with the query filter "Terms with ID set by the shortcode attribute" then place this view within the Book View and somehow grab the taxonomy ID of the selected taxonomy of the filter... Is this possible?
Hello, there are a couple of problems in this approach.
1. The current search View uses AJAX to update its results whenever the filter(s) are changed. There is no AJAX API for retrieving View results, so you would not be able to get the updated taxonomy term results when a filter changes like this. The custom search View would have to be configured to require a page refresh and the necessary updated URL parameters. However...
2. A taxonomy search filter in the main View will not include the term ID necessary for filtering a taxonomy View. The filter will include the term slug as its value, rather than the term ID. So you could access that selected term slug using the shortcode wpv-search-term, but not its ID. That is a problem because in the current software a taxonomy View cannot be filtered by term slug, only by term ID (screenshot). You would need some type of custom code with our PHP API to apply a conversion from the term slug to the term ID for the View filter to process.
3. You cannot create taxonomy Views in the Block Editor, but it looks like you're using legacy Views anyway so that's probably not a major concern for you.

Another option I would consider is to not filter the taxonomy View by term, but to include the results for all terms upon page load. Hide them all using CSS, then use custom JavaScript to pull data out of that hidden View and display it above the main results whenever the filter is modified. I assume it would be similar to how you're setting the headline above the results, so you probably have much of the necessary code structures written already.

[Timothy]

Thanks for all that detail. I'd really prefer to keep the Ajax search results, so I think I will try the css option. My only concern would be that there are several hundred book categories so including all those terms could get heavy and bog things down. Or would that not really be a concern?

[Christian Cox]

I would try it and see, it's hard to guess about this because there are many different variables involved like the server setup and database engine, as well as front-end variables like how the results are displayed. Views implements a caching layer on the database, so some of the strain of that query on the server could be limited by caching the term View. Views caching is implemented by default, so there's nothing you need to do to activate it. The situations that disable caching are explained here: https://toolset.com/documentation/legacy-features/views-plugin/how-to-use-views-parametric-search-on-large-sites/
As long as you avoid these cache invalidating situations, Views caching will be in play. You can also install a plugin like Query Monitor to examine the queries involved to see if the overall page load time is impacted severely, or run tests with a system like https://www.webpagetest.org/ with and without the full term View.

[Timothy]

My issue is resolved now. Thank you!