get *all* children under a container

the functions getActiveChildren and getAllChildren don’t seem to be working for me. how can I get *everything* under a container? something that returns all the documents, containers, documents in containers, in every level, regardless of publish status. thanks in advance

There is no direct API for this. Ditto accomplishes this using a heavily modified combination of the API functions getChildIds and getDocuments, however you should be able to use those functions as is to achieve the same result (but not the same performance ).

Is there documentation on the current API functions like those and how to use them? If not, will there be?

Similar to what was done for the document object:
http://www.modxcms.com/the-document-object.html

Here is getChildIDs : http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/API:getChildIds
I don’t believe there is any documentation for getDocuments but you can just look up the function in manager/includes/document.parser.inc.php

As for the future of the documentation, there are already many threads addressing that.

that does return everything, just what i want, you rock Mark!