Reading nested field collections

Question

I have a field collection called field_sections that has inside it it 2 fields:

field_section_title (just plain text field) field_menu_item(field collection with 4 fields)

field_menu_item has 4 fields

 - field_item_title 
 - field_menu_image
 - field_item_price
 - field_item_description

I would like to build an array sections, and those sections are objects that contain menu_items, which are objects that contain menu_items.

I have tried something so far, but unfortunately I can only get the sections and not the nested menu_items and their values. For some reason in their place, only a number is contained instead of the actual field value.

How can I build those arrays?

ps:my apologies for the basic question, but I'm just now getting my hands dirty with PHP and this further complicates things for me.

This is what I did so far:

//prepare array
$sections;
$sectionsCounter = 0;

$node = node_load(8);
//Load sections field collection
$items = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_section');
foreach ($items as $item) {

   $sectionItems;
   $sectionItemsCounter = 0;
   $fc = field_collection_field_get_entity($item);
   $sectionTitle = $fc->field_section_title["und"][0]["value"];
   //push item into array now
   $sections[$sectionsCounter]["sectionTitle"] = $sectionTitle;
   $sectionsCounter++;

}

I have only managed to get the title of each section so far and push it into an array as an object with property title

---

UPDATE:

Well ,it seems I somehow got it to work, but I'm worried this is not the best solution. Can someone please have a look and tell me if I'm doing this the correct way?

//Load sections field collection 
  $sections;
  $sectionsCounter = 0;

  $node = node_load(8);
  $items = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_section');
  foreach ($items as $item) {

     $sectionItems;
     $fc = field_collection_field_get_entity($item);
     $sectionTitle = $fc->field_section_title["und"][0]["value"];
     $sections[$sectionsCounter]["sectionTitle"] = $sectionTitle;
     $itemsField = $fc->field_menu_item["und"][0]["value"];


     $innerCounter = 0;
     for ($i=0; $i <sizeof($fc->field_menu_item["und"]); $i++) { 

        $arr = $fc->field_menu_item["und"][$i]["value"];
        $innerArray = entity_load('field_collection_item', array($arr));
          foreach ($innerArray as $item) {
            $sections[$sectionsCounter]["sectionItem"+$i] = $item;
          }
        $innerCounter++;
     }

     $sectionsCounter++;
  }

I've managed to create 2 objects that each contain:

A section title An object that holds all the fields that the 'inner' field collection of the section contains

Answer 1

You could make use of

entity_load('field_collection_item', array($item_id))

This how-do-i-load-a-field-collection-from-a-node post provides multiple solutions for your problem!!