Category: PHP

I won’t get into all of the details of why I needed this functionality, but I was working on developing an online payment process using Gravity Forms and Authorize.net and the accounting office requested a very, very specific reporting format.

After developing a convoluted system using Google App Scripts to combine, archive, package, and delivery this data on a daily basis from multiple forms on multiple sites – the accounting office requested the CSV data also be merged with transaction data from Authorize.net. It would save them significant amounts of time. (Also, Google App Scripts are REALLY amazing for managing and automating documents and spreadsheets.)

Unfortunately Gravity Forms payment add-ons store payment data in a separate table and then simply call it when you view and entry in the dashboard, but it’s not accessible from the regular GFAPI entry object. Sigh.

So here’s what I came up with. Hopefully another poor soul may find it useful…

The problem

I was working to create a system that allowed users to submit a Gravity Form entry with multiple file attachments that would create a post on the front end, printing those attachments. GF and the wonderful Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin makes it easy to map a form field to a custom meta field (new or existing) – however I ran into a snag when trying to display multiple file uploads.  Simply echoing get_post_meta was just returning one of the meta field values, not each value.

The answer

Create a simple loop that stores each of the meta values to a variable, then loop through each echoing out the file links. This loop will need to be added to the post content either via theme template, filtering the_content(), and adding it onto a hook.  With this particular project using Genesis, I added it to the genesis_entry_content hook.

<?php $bulletin_files = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'bulletin_file_upload' );
 if ( $bulletin_files ) : ?>
 <div><ul>
 <?php foreach( $bulletin_files as $url ) { ?>
 <li><a href="<?php echo $url; ?>">
 <?php echo basename($url ); ?>
 </a></li>
 <?php } ?>
 </ul></div>
 <?php endif; ?>

A really cool function used in the snippet above is basename(). It’s a simple php function that takes a string for a file path (in this case a url) and just grabs that filename at the end of the string.  Pretty cool and way simpler than some regex solution.