Get all Children in the order defined in Sitecore

Question

I have following structure in sitecore

> Country 
    > India
    > Srilanka 
    > Bangladesh

The following query returns all the child items but in alphabetical order

 string parentItemPath = "fast:/"+ SitecoreHelper.GetItemUnversioned(Model.Item.ID.ToString()).Paths.Path;
 Item[] allItems = SitecoreHelper.GetVersionedItemsByQuery(parentItemPath + "/*" );

But I need the child items in the order defined in Sitecore.
i.e, Same as like Content Tree Order.Is there any way to achieve this.

UPDATE: I have found one solution, not sure whether it is efficient or not Provide values for sort field in each Item, like 200 to India, 201 to Srilanka and so on, and view the same in View. They are listed as same number.

Answer 1

Fast query runs on the database directly. In most of the scenarios it's not an ideal choice.

If you want to get children in the same order as they are defined in Sitecore, use Sitecore API.

Model.Item.Children
Model.Item.GetChildren()

Item.GetChildren() method can take ChildListOptions as the parameter. Here are available flags:

ChildListOptions.None
ChildListOptions.IgnoreSecurity
ChildListOptions.AllowReuse
ChildListOptions.SkipSorting

Answer 2

Welcome to Sitecore.

If you want to have the first level children of an item use:

selectedItem.GetChildren()

There are many ways to implement this so below is just one example:

var countryItem = Database.GetDatabase("master").GetItem(countryItemID);
if (countryItem != null)
    var allFirstLevelChildren = countryItem.GetChildren();

This should return all items as they are on Sitecore Content Tree.

If you change your mind and want to sort this list or manipulate it then you can use LINQ for example:

var items = countryItem.GetChildren().Where(x => x.TemplateID == "{CountryTemplateId}");

or

var items = countryItem.GetChildren().OrderBy(x => x.Name);

Now, if you want to have ALL levels children of an item, again there are different ways to implement this but particularly I like to use the one below:

Database.GetDatabase("master").SelectItems(countryItem.Paths.Path + "//*").ToList();

Another very common function to get all levels of children is:

countryItem.Axes.GetDescendants();

I hope that helps.