Get children of specific parent

Question

This one seems deceptively simple, but I am struggling. My home page is a single, and in that template I want to retrieve the children of a specific entry in a structure, then loop through them. Here is a code example that does not work:

{% set entries = craft.entries.id(4).children %}
{% for entry in entries %}
    do something
{% endfor %}

This returns the page with id 4 instead of its children.

I also tried something like:

{% set entries = craft.entries.section('pages').descendantsOf('targetpage') %}

Maybe I need to retrieve the entire section and do a conditional loop for entries where the parent entry ID is 4, but the proper syntax for that eludes me.

Could someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to get the parent entry model before requesting its children with the getChildren method. craft.entries.id(4) only creates a criteria model prepared to query for entries matching your criteria. You now have to use the first method to query for an entry model.

{% set parent = craft.entries.id(4).first() %}

{# Check if it indead returned an entry model, could also return nothing #}
{% if parent %}
    {% set children = parent.children %}
{% endif %}