SuperTable Field returning null

Question

I am performing a query from within a plugin like so:

$criteria = craft()->elements->getCriteria(ElementType::Entry);
$criteria->section = $journeyTitle;
$response = $criteria->find();
$attributes = $response[0]->getContent()->getAttributes();
var_dump($attributes);

The dump gives me the following:

array(7) {
  ["id"]=>
  string(1) "3"
  ["elementId"]=>
  string(1) "3"
  ["locale"]=>
  string(5) "en_us"
  ["title"]=>
  string(7) "Armenia"
  ["lifeBeforeColumnOne"]=>
  NULL
  ["lifeBeforeColumnTwo"]=>
  NULL
  ["tester"]=>
  string(12) "fdsfsdfdsfsd"
}

Has anyone ever used Super Table Before, and know why this would be showing up null? I would REALLY like to use this on my project, but am not really sure on how to proceed with this.

For reference, here is a screenshot of the entry that you see outputted within the dump:

Answer 1

The reason the attribute for your Super Table is null is because the field is an element, which doesn't have 'simple' content. You'll find this is the exact same case for any other element like an Entries field, or a Matrix field.

I believe the reason for this is that this simply fetches the content from the actual craft_content table. Being complex (relational) data, there's technically nothing in the content table. Getting the content is a little more complex.

In the case of Super Table (and other elements), when querying the field's content on an attached element, you'll get an ElementCriteriaModel (for Craft 2) returned, which allows you to do all sorts of things when outputting the content of a Super Table (limit, order, etc).

To illustrate, you can do:

var_dump($response[0]->lifeBeforeColumnOne);

Which will output the ElementCriteriaModel, which will be not overly useful for actual content output. In addition, you'll want to call find() on the criteria (just like you're doing above in your code to fetch the entries) to return an array of SuperTable_BlockModel's.

$blocks = $response[0]->lifeBeforeColumnOne->find();

foreach ($blocks as $block) {
    var_dump($block->featuredImage);
    var_dump($block->textContent);
    var_dump($block->source);
}

You can then output the content by targeting the inner fields'.

You might also find this slightly related conversation useful - Getting all content, including Matrix fields from an EntryModel

There's also an example of this sort of functionality on the docs - https://verbb.io/craft-plugins/super-table/docs/guides/developer-examples#fetching-content-from-a-super-table-field