Gutenberg: Support for storing CPT metadata in Custom Database Tables

[cr101]

As an example, we have two CPTs, Books and Authors, and we would like to store the Books metadata (i.e parent_id, isbn, subtitle, average_rating, ratings_count, publication_date, num_pages, bisac_code, author_id, etc) in a custom DB table "Books" and also store the Authors metadata (i.e works_count, date_of_birth, fans_count, average_rating, etc) in a custom DB table "Authors".

We would then like to query the data like so:

SELECT p.post_id, p.post_title, p.post_content, b.subtitle, b.average_rating, a.post_tile as author_name
FROM wp_posts as p
INNER JOIN books as b ON p.post_id = b.parent_id
INNER JOIN authors as a ON b.author_id = a.id
WHERE b.average_rating => 3 AND YEAR(b.publication_date) => 2007 AND bisac_code = 'FIC009050' AND a.average_rating => 3

Storing all the CPTs metadata in wp_postmeta is not an option because searching over 1 million rows would be very slow and doesn't scale and it's the reason why WooCommerce is moving orders and products to custom DB tables as well.

Will I be able to add custom fields/meta blocks to the two CPTs in Gutenberg and then save that meta data in custom database tables?

[pmgarman]

You already can do this without the need for changes to Gutenberg. You can do it now without Gutenberg actually. We do it on projects of ours semi regulrly.

[cr101]

@pmgarman Yes, you can already save the CPTs metadata in custom db tables without Gutenberg but I'm fairly certain that you can't yet do that with Gutenberg.

[youknowriad]

Building blocks that store things in several CPT fields is possible using the EntityProvider and useEntityProperty hook. You can check how PostTitle, PostExcerpt... blocks work.