Sub query order not really respected...

[WillyReyno]

Hello,

I want to display my posts with different sizes on my homepage (with a pagination)

• 2 little news
• 1 big article
• 2 little news
• 1 big article

In order to achieve this, I added a custom field "news_or_big" which equals "news" for little news, and "big" for big articles.

The problem is that at the end, the order of my queries is not respected and I get :

• 2 little news
• 2 little news
• 1 big article
• 1 big article

I don't know if I did it the right way, here's my code :

//-----------------
            // Sub query #1:
            //-----------------
            $args1 = [
                // get field news
                'post_type' => 'post',
                'category__not_in' => 31,
                'posts_per_page' => 2,
                'meta_key' => 'news_or_big',
                'meta_value' => 'news'
            ];

            //-----------------
            // Sub query #2:
            //-----------------
            $args2 = [
                // get big news
                'post_type' => 'post',
                'category__not_in' => 31,
                'posts_per_page' => 1,
                'meta_key' => 'news_or_big',
                'meta_value' => 'big'
            ];

            //-----------------
            // Sub query #3:
            //-----------------
            $args3 = [
                // get field news
                'post_type' => 'post',
                'category__not_in' => 31,
                'posts_per_page' => 2,
                'meta_key' => 'news_or_big',
                'meta_value' => 'news',
                'offset' => 2,
            ];

            //-----------------
            // Sub query #4:
            //-----------------
            $args4 = [
                // get big news
                'post_type' => 'post',
                'category__not_in' => 31,
                'posts_per_page' => 1,
                'meta_key' => 'news_or_big',
                'meta_value' => 'big',
                'offset' => 1,
            ];

            //---------------------------
            // Combined queries #1 + #2 + #3 + #4:
            //---------------------------
            $args = [
                'posts_per_page' => 6,
                'orderby' => 'meta_value',
                'paged' => $paged,
                'combined_query' => [
                    'args' => [$args1, $args2, $args3, $args4],
                    'union' => 'UNION',
                ]
            ];

Thank you for your help!

[therealgilles]

Adding the following should fix your issues:

add_filter( 'cq_orderby', function( $orderby ) { return ''; });

[birgire]

Changelog
1.1.0 (2020-09-04)

Added: Ticket #19 - Add test cases for argument order workaround. (Props: therealgilles)
Cleanup: phpcs

See https://github.com/birgire/wp-combine-queries/blob/master/tests/Integration/test-combined-query.php