Displaying Description instead of Name for Custom Taxonomy in Dropdown?

Anonymous

#251375

I have a custom taxonomy which has numbers for names. So the items go from 0001 – 2500. I have 2500 items in the custom taxonomy.

However, for each tag name, I also have a “description”. The descriptions are words like “forest” or “ocean”, etc. So each taxonomy items has a name like “0035” and a description like “ocean”.

I want my users to search based on the custom taxonomy Descriptions, not the name. In the dropdown or checkbox, they only see 0001,0002,0003,etc. Bu that means nothing to them. Instead I want to display forest,ocean,mountain,beach,etc.

How can I select to display the custom taxonomy Description instead of the Name in the search form?

Trevor

#251425

It is possible, but only with custom PHP coding that you (or a third party coder you would hire) would have to do.

You would have to use this filter in your child theme function.php file:

https://searchandfilter.com/documentation/action-filter-reference/#filter-input-object

You would use PHP to fetch an array of ALL the descriptions and terms, and then step through the field options replacing each in turn.

Anonymous

#262498

While this thread is a few months old, here is the code for my solution used for a current project. The code below gets the terms for the taxonomy called ‘commodity_codes’ and then updates the Search and Filter field ‘_sft_commodity_codes’ in my search forms by leaving the value intact for the query and simply updating the label to be a concatenation of the term name and the first 21 characters of the description with camel casing.

Thanks to the gist here: https://gist.github.com/rmorse/7b59b45a14b1ca179868

function filter_function_name($input_object, $sfid)
{
	if($input_object['name']=='_sft_commodity_codes')
	{
		//if we want to filter the options generated, we need to make sure the options variable actually exists before proceeding (its only available to certain field types)
		if(!isset($input_object['options']))
		{
			return $input_object;
		}
		
		//get the terms for the taxonomy
		$terms = get_terms('commodity_codes');
		
		//now we know there are options we can loop through each one, and change what we need
		foreach($input_object['options'] as $option)
		{
			foreach($terms as $term)
			{
				if($term->name==$option->value)
				{//we want to change the label for the option "black" - we can feed back in the count number to the label for this field type
					$option->label = $term->name . ' : ' . ucwords(substr($term->description,0,21));
				}
			}
		}
	}
	
	return $input_object;
}
add_filter('sf_input_object_pre', 'filter_function_name', 10, 2);

Hope this helps others.

— Tom @NPCrowd : https://npcrowd.com

Trevor

#262513

Thanks for sharing Tom. I know others will find that useful. I will close this thread for now, as it is old.

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