Post sub field Bricks Query Loop in a Meta Box Group field

Let’s consider this Meta Box field group for Pages:

FAQs is a Group-type of field in which one of the sub fields is “Answer Post”, a Post-type of field.

“Sample Page” being edited:

On the front end we want to show the question heading and below that, the content (rather the excerpt) of the selected answer post for each question as the answer.

Like this:

This Pro tutorial for Bricks users shows how we can loop through the FAQs Meta Box group and inside that set up another query loop to show the selected post’s data. This is one of the few ways in which this problem can be solved.

Step 1

Edit the Template that applies to your post type or a specific Page with Bricks.

Add a Section and inside its Container, add a Block and enable query loop on it.

Select your Meta Box group as the query type.

You may want to add a Heading element and set its text to the Question sub field.

Step 2

Add a Block beneath the Heading.

Enable query loop and the PHP query editor.

Paste:

return [
	'post_type' => 'post',
	'posts_per_page' => 1,
	'no_found_rows' => true,
	'post__in' => [BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )->loop_object['answer_post']],
];

Replace gchryj with the Bricks ID of the outer query loop element – the one whose query type is the Meta Box group.

Replace answer_post with the ID of the Post-type sub field.

Add a Basic Text element and set its text to the post excerpt. You can add any Bricks elements and use the usual dynamic data tags to show the post sub field’s data.

That’s it. Check the front end.

If you are curious as to how this works, read along.

BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )

is a PHP object that contains the sub field data for each row of the Meta Box group in a key called loop_object.

BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )->loop_object

therefore would be:

-> is called the object operator and it is how we access the values of an object’s property values.

and from that we are interested in getting the IDs of the answer_posts. Therefore,

BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )->loop_object['answer_post']

would be:

BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )->loop_object

for each group row is an array and

BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )->loop_object['answer_post']

gets the value of a key named answer_post.

The value of post__in value in the loop’s PHP query editor should be an array and so we wrap square brackets around it:

[BricksQuery::get_query_for_element_id( 'gchryj' )->loop_object['answer_post']]