How can I take collection handle from metafield

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A developer is working with Shopify collections that have a custom.parent_collection metafield of type Collection. They want to display subcollections within a parent collection by matching collections that reference the parent through this metafield.

Current Challenge:

  • Need to compare collection handles to establish parent-child relationships
  • Attempting to filter collections where the metafield is blank (top-level collections) and then match child collections
  • Uncertain about the correct approach for handle comparison in Liquid

Code Context:
The provided code snippet shows a loop through collections checking for blank parent metafields and attempting to match child collections, but the code appears incomplete or corrupted with reversed syntax.

Status: The question remains unanswered with no solution or alternative approaches suggested yet.

Summarized with AI on November 7. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Each collection has a custom.parent_collection metafield of type Collection. I need to display subcollections inside a collection that refer to it through a metafield. If people don’t like the collection, then it’s just a title. But now the problem is, I don’t understand how to compare their handle. Perhaps there is a better way to do this.

      <div class="business-categories__items">
        {% for parent_collection in collections %}
          {% if parent_collection.metafields.custom.parent_collection == blank %}
            <div class="category-item">
              <div class="category-item__title">
                <p>{{ parent_collection.title }}</p>
              </div>

              {% for child_collection in collections %}
                {% if child_collection.metafields.custom.parent_collection == parent_collection.handle %}
                  <div class="category-item__child-title">
                    <p>{{ child_collection.title }}</p>
                  </div>
                {% endif %}
              {% endfor %}
            </div>
          {% endif %}
        {% endfor %}
      </div>