Allow for querying descendants - children recursively

There is a need for this expressed https://www.getlektor.com/docs/api/db/record/children/ and on gitter.

To be clear, instead of returning only the direct, 1st generation children of a record, descendants would be recursive for the entire depth of the record and return all children of all depths.

We already have this.children recursive, but I think descendants still has a use, as it allows you to chain methods together more easily.

[xlotlu]

I’d like to see glob patterns working in queries, and this would solve this here issue.

site.query('/blog-categories/*')

would be equivalent to the current behaviour.

But

site.query('/blog-categories/**')

would fetch everything recursively.

[torian257x]

true that would solve this exact issue and something like that is what I currently plan on doing.

now what about say, blog categories with sub categories?

e.g.

[fields.categories]
label = Categories
type = checkboxes
source = site.query('/blog-categories')
width = 1/2

I want not only ‘blog-categories’ but as well it’s sub categories.

something is missing, yes, if there is just one level of blog categories it works. But bad luck to you if you want to do something slightly different.

what about you want a resource in a different place than /resources as well? Say I have some videos as well in /training I already tried you cannot define the slug to be ../training/something that was btw one of the first things I tried with lektor.

the question: “get me all video records” can only be solved in the view via recursive function calls. I don’t think thats cool.

I say I want to query all records never matter where they are. And I want to have them available on model definition level. If it’s only available on view level, it limits in what I can do with it. And I want to run actually nice queries over all records. That is not something insane to ask for imho. By all means, if there is a way to achieve it, please tell me.

as soon as the structure gets a little bit more complex, the records are a bit spread out, the air gets really thin for lektor. And that wasn’t clear to me to begin with. And I don’t think it’s cool. It should be simple and fun to work with lektor.

On 19 September 2017 at 12:39, Andreas Runfalk [e-mail] wrote:

If you want to sole the particular case /resources/something/slug I think you can solve that with children and one sub-folder:

• You have the resources model
• You have a resource model with some kind of way to distinguish between the different types
• You set the URL slug to something like {{ this.type }}/{{ this._id }}, where type can be pdfs, white-papers, videos, etc. This will give you the URLs you want while still keeping a sane data model

I have not tried this, but in theory it seems very doable. You can read more about it on https://www.getlektor.com/docs/content/urls/

If that can be a solution to your particular issue I think adding descendants adds more complexity than it’s worth.

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