Enabling support for a third-party field

ACF Custom Database Tables ships with support for the field types bundled with ACF. Field types provided by third-party plugins — such as ACF Extended, or any other plugin that registers its own ACF field type — are not supported out of the box. To store a third-party field’s values in a custom database table, you need to register the field type as supported.

This is done with the acfcdt/is_supported_field filter:

<?php
/*
 * Register a third-party ACF field type as supported by ACF Custom Database Tables.
 * Drop this in your theme's functions.php or a small site-specific plugin.
 */
add_filter( 'acfcdt/is_supported_field', function ( $is_supported, $field ) {

  // The field type name as registered by the third-party plugin.
  if ( $field['type'] === 'acfe_advanced_link' ) {
    return true;
  }

  return $is_supported;
}, 10, 2 );

Once the field type is registered as supported, it will be included in table definition generation, and its values will be written to your custom table on save.

Finding the field type name

The $field['type'] value is the slug the third-party plugin uses when it registers the field via acf_register_field_type(). You can confirm it by inspecting the field array in your code (for example, by var_dumping $field inside the filter) or by looking at the third-party plugin’s source.

Controlling the column data type

Third-party fields often store more complex values than the core ACF field types. If the default column type isn’t a good fit, override it using the acfcdt/set_column_data_type filter — see Controlling column data types for the full reference.

Transforming the value before storage

If the third-party field returns a structure that needs reshaping before it hits the table — for example, flattening a multi-part value into a string, or encoding an array as JSON — use the acfcdt/filter_value_before_update filter. See Filtering values before insertion.

See also

• Activating support for a custom field type — the same filter, framed for field types you’ve written yourself.

If you run into issues with the data a particular third-party field provides, let us know so we can account for it in a future update.