[Resolved] Selector in Connect existing Object (from relationship) does not load titles

[Author]

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[Jevgenijs]

I am trying to: Connect Archival Object to Person from relationship

Link to a page where the issue can be seen: hidden link (example with Elisabeth Hill)

I expected to see: after pressing Connect existing Archival Object, Titles of objects should load.

Instead, I got: Instead empty or "Auto Draft" entities appear in select UI.

The reverse attempt of attaching Person to Object is also impossible because of the same issue.

[Jevgenijs]

I attached screenshots illustrating the problem

[Jevgenijs]

I believe this issue arises when CPT in relationship does not have wp-post-title. This is a problem, because customer has a set of custom fields with Title of object is defined as a custom text field.

Question: how can I get that custom Titles from that fields in select UI for "Connect existing [something]"?

[Nigel]

The selector is based upon the post title, so if your posts do not have titles then, yes, that will not work.

How are the posts—with no title—being created?

If they are being published from the front-end it would be easy enough to automatically update the title based upon a custom field value using the Forms API (e.g. the cred_save_data hook: https://toolset.com/documentation/programmer-reference/cred-api/#cred_save_data).

If the posts are being submitted from the backend you could do something similar with WordPress's own API, e.g. the save_post hook (https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/save_post/).

[Jevgenijs]

No, posts are created from admin part. Are "post titles" obligatory and not replaceable? If yes, it seems I have to find way to auto-generate them. Is there a way to auto-generate post titles on existing posts from custom field?

[Nigel]

Post titles are only obligatory inasmuch as that's what is used in the post selector for identifying posts. It's pretty unusual for posts to not have a title at all.

So, yes, you'll want to auto-generate titles based on the custom field.

If you have existing data to update, you can add PHP at Toolset > Settings > Custom Code, which helpfully has the option to run code one time only.

So you can run a batch job that gets the posts that need updating (get_posts), iterates over them and gets the custom field value (get_post_meta) and then updates the post (wp_update_post).

[Jevgenijs]

My issue is resolved now. Thank you!
I found answer in here - https://toolset.com/forums/topic/add-auto-generate-post-title-from-fields/#post-1213248
So I adopted this approach and used WP Bulk Edit to mass update Auto Draft and empty titles after placing this code to functions.php

function sha_autogenerate_title2( $post_id, $post ){
       
  if ( 'archival-objects' == $post->post_type ) {
         
    $archobj_titel = get_post_meta( $post_id, 'wpcf-title-of-archival-object', true );
         
    $new_title = $archobj_titel;
    $new_title = sanitize_text_field( $new_title );
    $new_slug = sanitize_title( $new_title );
         
    $args = array(
      'ID'          =>   $post_id,
      'post_title'  =>   $new_title,
      'post_name'   =>   $new_slug
    );
 
       // unhook this function so it doesn't loop infinitely
        remove_action('save_post', 'sha_autogenerate_title2',30,2);
 
        // update the post, which calls save_post again
        wp_update_post( $args );
 
        // re-hook this function
        add_action('save_post', 'sha_autogenerate_title2',30,2);
 
     
  }  
}
add_action( 'save_post', 'sha_autogenerate_title2', 30, 2 );