Why Ditto returns no documents.

I’ve pondered this point many times. For some reason that is not readily obvious, Ditto will just not return documents when it seems that it should.

Consider a typical case where you a container document with ID=20 containing five child documents (ID=[21..25]). Placing a Ditto call in another document (say, ID=4) returns no documents--you get the No Documents Found report.

[!Ditto? parents=`20` &depth=`1` &display=`all` &debug=`1` !]

The first thing to do is to turn on debugging as shown but that often does not provide the necessary insights. What do you do to debug your annoying Ditto call failures?

You seem to be missing the & in front of parents in your call.

Bunk beet me to it. But Ditto is ignoring the parents without th & and using the default value which is the current document instead.

Shane, you’ve got to be quick around here

That doesn’t seem to help.

My exact call is:


The debug console acknowledges all parameters but still the call returns "No documents found."

Are the child documents published?

Yes, they are published. But, while checking, I noticed that Web Access is Private.

I set one of the documents to not private and it shows up in the Ditto results now. I suppose the present cause is now known but how do I get pagetitle and alias from a private document?

Are you sure that doc id 114 has children? The doc ID is the number that hows in () next to the document in the doc tree.



For you to get results the doc tree would show:

Yes, document 114 has children [117..125].

Last thing that comes to mind: Try changing [! !] to [[ ]].

If that doesn’t work then I am stumped.