Query for multiple comment statuses

[ebinnion]

I am currently working on a project where I need to query both trashed and approved comments. Currently, I am doing this by calling get_comments twice and then merging the results.

I think it would be more ideal if a developer could query for multiple comment statuses by passing in an array of statuses.

For example:

$comments = get_comments(
	array(
		'status' => array( 'trash', 'approve' )
	)
);

My use case is that I want to show trashed comments (with a "This comment was trashed notice' ) as well as approved comments in an effort to better preserve conversation threads. Here is an example:

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #20006, #21571.

[karpstrucking]

add support for array of comment statuses in get_comments()

[nacin]

There is a lot of history in those few lines of code. See #21101. I don't think this is as simple as wrapping a foreach around it, as 'all' probably needs to be handled a bit differently, etc.

Also, would need unit tests.

[karpstrucking]

Replying to nacin:

There is a lot of history in those few lines of code. See #21101. I don't think this is as simple as wrapping a foreach around it, as 'all' probably needs to be handled a bit differently, etc.

Also, would need unit tests.

That was an interesting read, thanks for that. I believe my patch retains the existing handling for a status of 'all': it's still "( comment_approved = '0' OR comment_approved = '1' )"

Although, it occurs to me that if 'all' is included as one of the statuses in an array, it will be ignored. I'm not sure what the behaviour should be in that situation.

[ebinnion]

Alternative patch for allowing an array of comment statuses.

[ebinnion]

I have added an alternative patch that will allow an array of comment statuses.

karpstrucking brought up a good point about how to handle all in the array of statuses. I took the approach to add the approve and hold statuses if not already present.

[ebinnion]

Updates patch to include unit tests.

[ebinnion]

I have updated the patch to include a couple of unit tests. I have verified that the unit tests are passing with my suggested patch.

vagrant@vvv:/srv/www/wordpress-develop$ phpunit --group comment
Installing...
Running as single site... To run multisite, use -c tests/phpunit/multisite.xml
Not running ajax tests... To execute these, use --group ajax.
PHPUnit 4.0.20 by Sebastian Bergmann.

Configuration read from /srv/www/wordpress-develop/phpunit.xml.dist

........................

Time: 3.89 seconds, Memory: 60.50Mb

OK (24 tests, 178 assertions)
vagrant@vvv:/srv/www/wordpress-dev

[ebinnion]

Adding patch with improved whitespace.

[psycleuk]

I'm also working on a project where multiple statuses need to be returned at the same time. The patch by ebinnion would be ideal. The work around at the moment is to combine the statuses together into a single 'status' then filter on 'comments_clauses' to explode it back out.

I'd also like to see it combined with ryans patch ( https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21101#comment:27 ) which included a 'full' option which then allowed no comment_approved column to be part of the SQL. The reason for that is if you are requesting a custom comment type then you may well want all regardless of status.

[boonebgorges]

In 29980:

Improve unit tests for 'status' param in WP_Comment_Query.

See #29612.

[boonebgorges]

In [29980], I added some more systematic unit tests for the existing functionality.

29612.patch​ adds support for multiple comment statuses:

• Accepts an array or a comma-separated string
• A value of 'any' will cause the 'comment_approved' clause to be skipped, returning comments regardless of 'comment_approved' value. 'any' will override any status it's included with (eg array( 'any', 'approve' )
• The 'any' functionality means that sometimes the 'approved' WHERE clause will be empty - and, in certain cases, the WP_Comment_Query SQL query will not contain a WHERE clause at all. This means that the current way of concatenating the WHERE clause won't work. I've changed it so that it builds an array of subclauses, which get assembled just before the final query string is built. Note that in the case of date_query, meta_query, and get_search_sql(), this meant stripping the leading ' AND ' from the SQL chunks. A bit ugly, but necessary for backward compatibility.

[boonebgorges]

In 30084:

Support multiple 'status' values in WP_Comment_Query.

This change required turning the SQL concatenation into the generation of an
array, for greater flexibility.

Props karpstrucking, ebinnion.
Fixes #29612.

[ocean90]

[30084] brokes /wp-admin/edit-comments.php. The All view includes spam comments now too.

[boonebgorges]

ocean90 - Crud, thanks for the heads up.

[boonebgorges]

In 30093:

Support an empty string passed as a status in WP_Comment_Query.

The changes in [30084] broke backward compatibility with interfaces that
manually passed an empty string for the value of 'status', such as on
wp-admin/edit-comments.php.

Fixes #29612.