For developers: Retrieve child items

When working with hierarchical content types, you will need to get child content items for a specific parent. The following procedure describes how to achieve this using the dynamic module manager.
For more information about the sample code snippets used in the article, see Example: Retrieve and create child items.

Before getting children of an item, we recommend to check if the item has any children. You do this in the following way: 

To retrieve the child items of a parent item, you must get a collection of all child items that are one level under a parent, in the following way: 

Hierarchical content types are working with a Sitefinity CMS workflow. If you have not defined any workflow, Sitefinity CMS uses the default one. The items are represented in two versions – Master and Live. When you create a new content item, Sitefinity CMS first creates the master version. After you publish the item, Sitefinity CMS creates the live version, which is a copy of the master one. Only the live versions of items are visible on the frontend. When you want to modify an item, you change the master version. When you publish the changes, a new live version is created and displayed on the frontend.

Because of this the hierarchy is persisted only by the master items. When you perform operations such as getting all of the children of an item or setting a parent, you use the master versions. Use the following examples to work with different versions of content items:

• To retrieve an item’s live version by having its child master version, use the following code:
• To retrieve child item’s live versions by having their parent, use the following code: