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Here's a demo of how it currently works. Still a WIP but any feedback would be appreciated:

What do you think about add the setting to the existing input field like this?

What do you think about add the setting to the existing input field like this?

Hi 👋! Thanks for the question :D
During initial implementation, I had made the toggle set the existing text/input field to contain just the current page without hiding it like you suggested. However, the second toggle (the "Show all descendants one") will only work if we have exactly one parent (as get_page_children accepts one page id). So to avoid editors using the "show all descendants" toggle on multiple parents, I hid the text/input field when that toggle is visible. Hence, the current behaviour shown in my demo.

Does anyone have any thoughts regarding the approach I've taken codewise with regards to getting all descendants?
Currently the query fetches all pages from the database before filtering them with the use of get_page_children. This has required the use of 3 filters (query_loop_block_query_vars, post_limits_request and posts_results) and the use of a new post_ancestor attribute.

An alternative approach I did consider but haven't used would be to loop over the page hierarchy and execute a different sql query for every depth we need to fetch children from. (So one sql query would fetch the direct children of the parent, a second sql query would fetch the children of those children, etc, etc).

After some discussion in Slack, I'm going to try to add the post_ancestor query property to WordPress core so I don't have to use the 'hacky' approach of using filters.

See ticket here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/62953#ticket

Thanks again for working on this, @PaulREnglish!

Let's continue the technical discussion around post_ancestor in the core ticket. Once that's handled, the UI can be updated for the Query block.

I'm going to remove this enhancement request from the WP 6.8 project board.

Thanks again for working on this, @PaulREnglish!

My pleasure!

Let's continue the technical discussion around post_ancestor in the core ticket. Once that's handled, the UI can be updated for the Query block.

I'm going to remove this enhancement request from the WP 6.8 project board.

Sounds good.

@PaulREnglish raised this PR and the related Trac ticket in today's Dev Chat. While I agree that adding core support for querying all ancestors will require some discussion that will cause this to miss the 6.8 milestone, I think it might be worth reducing the scope of this PR to only address the original issue, which is to set the query block to show only direct children of the current page.

I think that could be done with existing functionality and then iterated on in future versions of GB that would be included in 6.9.

@PaulREnglish raised this PR and the related Trac ticket in today's Dev Chat. While I agree that adding core support for querying all ancestors will require some discussion that will cause this to miss the 6.8 milestone, I think it might be worth reducing the scope of this PR to only address the original issue, which is to set the query block to show only direct children of the current page.

I think that could be done with existing functionality and then iterated on in future versions of GB that would be included in 6.9.

Thanks very much for your input! I've reverted the ancestor/show all descendants toggle leaving behind only the "Set parent as current page" toggle which should hopefully address the original issue.

I'll take some screenshots of how it works then I can mark this PR as ready to review.

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