Running recursive querys

• pzh20

• October 28, 2022 at 3:45 pm

I have a field group with family member details. It contains 2 relationship fields pointing at the same field group for the mother and father.

Is it possible to run a recursive CTE query to list the decendants?

Many thanks

• John Huebner

• November 6, 2022 at 2:29 pm

Do you only have a relationship field that works in one direction, from children to parent?
The first suggestion I would make is to make the relationship fields bidirectional. There are several solutions for this, do a google search for “acf bidirectional relationship”

• pzh20

• November 6, 2022 at 3:09 pm

Thanks John,

Although it seems a good idea to change my configuration to a bidirectional relationship, that still doesn’t help with the idea of a recursive query. If I wanted to query a family tree showing a child, their parents, and the parents parents etc, I’d need some kind of recursive query.

Otherwise, I suppose I’d just have to do multiple queries in a recursive code block.

Regards
Pete

• John Huebner

• November 6, 2022 at 5:25 pm

Using an ACF relationship field to get children

function recursive_children($parent_id) {
  children = get_field('relationship_field', $parent_id);
  if ($children) {
    foreach ($children as $child) {
      // do some stuff with child
      
      // recurse this child
      recursive_children($child->ID);
      
      // do some other stuff with child
    }
  }
}