I'm trying to build a query to filter a list of employees by a location taxonomy. Some staff are fixed, in that they'll only ever work out of a single office, but others are flexible and work from them all.

If a user chooses to filter by Office 1, I want to display staff members assigned the Office 1 term for the location taxonomy and staff members with no term set at all.

For brevity I've stripped back the code below to the basic principles. I tried to set up a tax_query to query both the selected location and any posts without one set, but suspect the logic is flawed - any advice would be massively appreciated.

<!-- <select> field for user to select location -->
<form method="get">
    <select name="locations" id="locations">
    <option value="location-1">Location 1</option>
    <option value="location-2">Location 2</option>
    <option value="location-3">Location 3</option>
    <input type="submit">
</form>

// Target items by 'location' if option set in <select>
if(isset($_GET['locations'])) {
    $location = sanitize_text_field( $_GET['locations'] );
    $tax_query[] = array(
        'relation' => 'AND',
        array(
            'taxonomy' => location,
            'field'    => 'name',
            'terms'    => $location,
            'operator' => 'IN',
        ),
        array(
            'taxonomy' => location,
            'operator' => 'NOT IN',
        ),
    );
        
}

// Configure query args
$args = array(
    'post_type'      => 'staff',
    'posts_per_page' => -1,
    'tax_query'      => $tax_query,
    'order'          => 'ASC',
    'post_status'    => 'publish'
);

I'm trying to build a query to filter a list of employees by a location taxonomy. Some staff are fixed, in that they'll only ever work out of a single office, but others are flexible and work from them all.

If a user chooses to filter by Office 1, I want to display staff members assigned the Office 1 term for the location taxonomy and staff members with no term set at all.

For brevity I've stripped back the code below to the basic principles. I tried to set up a tax_query to query both the selected location and any posts without one set, but suspect the logic is flawed - any advice would be massively appreciated.

<!-- <select> field for user to select location -->
<form method="get">
    <select name="locations" id="locations">
    <option value="location-1">Location 1</option>
    <option value="location-2">Location 2</option>
    <option value="location-3">Location 3</option>
    <input type="submit">
</form>

// Target items by 'location' if option set in <select>
if(isset($_GET['locations'])) {
    $location = sanitize_text_field( $_GET['locations'] );
    $tax_query[] = array(
        'relation' => 'AND',
        array(
            'taxonomy' => location,
            'field'    => 'name',
            'terms'    => $location,
            'operator' => 'IN',
        ),
        array(
            'taxonomy' => location,
            'operator' => 'NOT IN',
        ),
    );
        
}

// Configure query args
$args = array(
    'post_type'      => 'staff',
    'posts_per_page' => -1,
    'tax_query'      => $tax_query,
    'order'          => 'ASC',
    'post_status'    => 'publish'
);

• wp-query
• custom-taxonomy
• terms

1 Answer 1

It's actually pretty simple: You'll want to use an OR relation, and use the NOT EXISTS operator for selecting posts that are not assigned to any terms in the specified taxonomy.

$tax_query[] = array(
    'relation' => 'OR',
    array(
        'taxonomy' => 'location',
        'field'    => 'name',
        'terms'    => $location,
    ),
    array(
        'taxonomy' => 'location',
        'operator' => 'NOT EXISTS',
    ),
);