[Resolved] Setting up post parents to enable wpdatatables

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[peterv-6]

My website has two related post types "company-profile" which is the parent and "ranking-data", the child.

Every month we rank the companies and import the ranking-data scores and other fields for the companies as custom fields to ranking-data.

I have been successfully using WPAllimport to import monthly company ranking data to my WP website to display the data in Company profiles.

I understand that WP-Types uses a hidden custom field to manage the parent-child relationship, in this case "_wpcf_belongs_company-profile_id".

I am now trying to set up a table using WPDatatables to display the data. I am getting the MySQL request written for me. My programmer has told me that for the MySQl request to work I need to use wp_post_parent for ranking-data to enable the ranks to be retrieved from the database.

I have been asked to do this:
"Can you set the "post_parent" value as respected "company_profile" ID for "ranking-data" in "wp_posts" table ?"

I gather this is done via PhPmyadmin...??

If I do change these settings as requested by the developer will this impact on how WP-types operates?

Please advise.

Peter

[Nigel Supporter Languages: English (English ) Spanish (Español ) Timezone: Europe/London (GMT+01:00)]

Hi Peter

The post_parent column in wp_posts is for the built-in WordPress concept of hierarchical posts, which is very different to Types post relationships, and I suspect your developer is confusing the two.

WordPress posts can be hierarchical, individual posts can have parents, where the id of the parent post is stored in wp_posts in the post_parent column. But these relationships are always between posts of the same type (whether relationships between standard posts, or between posts of a custom type, but always the same type).

Types provides a means to create a post hierarchy across post types, which has nothing to do with the built-in post hierarchies. I'm not sure what unintended side-effects you might experience if you try to duplicate the value of _wpcf_belongs_company-profile_id from wp_postmeta to the post_parent column of wp_posts, you would have to try it on a test installation and see.

If you were trying to do that in phpMyAdmin you would be writing a SQL query to do so, and if you have a developer writing a SQL to use in wpDataTables they should be able to write that query for you, too.

But I think it ill-advised. I'm not familiar with wpDataTables but if the idea is that you need to provide the SQL to retrieve the data as required, then you just need a better SQL query which uses table joins to make the required connections between company profiles and ranking data.

I may have may misunderstood what the requirement is for wpDataTables, and I'm no expert in crafting SQL queries either, but I think that is what you should be aiming for.