Handling archiveless posts in Elasticsearch queries

[renatonascalves]

Description

This is a similar problem with #61. The only difference is that Elasticsearch performs the request.

I noticed that by toggling the "Hide from Archives" button, the post is completely removed from Elasticsearch. Not only hidden but literally gone.

That means one can index post types with support for the plugin but need to search (with Elasticsearch) it is impossible.

In other Alley projects (see alleyinteractive/byline-manager#120), that's been talks about handling it in the culprit plugin rather than leaving to consumers to resolve.

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I was able to track the source of the issue to this line. That's then used here. That's being affected by these loc:

archiveless/inc/class-archiveless.php

Lines 189 to 223 in bd86603

	public function updated_post_meta( $meta_id, $object_id, $meta_key, $meta_value ) {
	// Only handle updates to this plugin's meta key.
	if ( self::$meta_key !== $meta_key ) {
	return;
	}
	// If we are autosaving or the current post is a revision, bail.
	if ( ( defined( 'DOING_AUTOSAVE' ) && DOING_AUTOSAVE )
	|| wp_is_post_revision( $object_id )
	|| wp_is_post_autosave( $object_id )
	) {
	return;
	}
	// Try to get the post object.
	$post_object = get_post( $object_id );
	if ( empty( $post_object->post_status ) ) {
	return;
	}
	// Get the current status and switch if necessary.
	$is_archiveless = 1 === (int) $meta_value;
	if ( $is_archiveless && 'publish' === $post_object->post_status ) {
	// Archiveless was requested, but the post's status is currently publish, so we need to change it.
	$post_object->post_status = self::$status;
	} elseif ( ! $is_archiveless && self::$status === $post_object->post_status ) {
	// Archiveless was turned off, so we need to set the post status back to publish.
	$post_object->post_status = 'publish';
	} else {
	// No change, so bail early.
	return;
	}
	// Update the post with the new status.
	wp_update_post( $post_object );

Use Case

This bug recently affected a client site. The client has a post type where they can't search the parent post in the Page Attributes slotfill because the archived parent doesn't appear in the results list (since it is removed from Elasticsearch).

The client uses VIP Search. But we should consider other plugins, like SearchPress, in the solution.