Wordpress create page from plugin with custom template - wordpress

Question

I have created a page successfully from my custom plugin and have successfully added a custom template to the template dropdown and associated successfully the template to that page.
The problem is that the template is not being loaded.
Here the code
$new_page = array(
'post_title' => __( 'Custom Page' ),
'post_name' => 'custom-page',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'post_author' => 1,
'post_type' => 'page',
'comment_status' => 'closed',
'ping_status' => 'closed',
'post_content' => '',
'menu_order' => 0,
// Assign page template
'page_template' => plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ ) . '/my-plugin-folder/my-plugin-custom-template.php'
);
// insert the post into the database
wp_insert_post( $new_page );
What am I doing wrong???

Answer 1

when page load will be searching for my-plugin-custom-template.php in the theme directory, so you will have to redirect that to your plugin directory by using the page_template filter like below the code.
function custom_redirect_page_template ($template) {
$post = get_post();
$page_template = get_post_meta( $post->ID, '_wp_page_template', true );
if ('my-plugin-custom-template.php' == basename ($page_template ))
$template = WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/my-plugin-folder/my-plugin-custom-template.php';
return $template;
}
add_filter ('page_template', 'custom_redirect_page_template');