Plugin development - Querying related data

Question

I am working on a Craft plugin.

I have a main entities are 'Courses' and 'Entries'. If I click on an Entries in the CMS there is an option to select and associated 'Course'.

In my controller I can get a Course as follows:

$course = craft()->entries->getEntryById($variables['pathId']);

So far so good, but now I want to get all related 'Entries', so I do the following:

$entries=$course->entries->find();

This gives the following error:

Property "Craft\EntryModel.entries" is not defined.  

What am I doing wrong? Clearly the two are related so why isn't this method working?

Answer 1

I think this works but is it an acceptable solution:

$criteria = craft()->elements->getCriteria(ElementType::Entry);
$criteria->section = 'checkin';

$criteria->relatedTo = array(
     'targetElement' => $entry,
     'field' => $field
);

$checkin = craft()->elements->findElements($criteria);

Answer 2

I think you're looking for

$criteria->with = array('fieldHandle');