Taxonomy archive template to have conditional logic for displaying child categories

I have a custom post-type “downloads”, and within the downloads menu, I have download categories, the taxonomy name is “downloadcats”.

My Downloads page uses a page template that lists all categories in the “downloadcats” taxonomy, this only shows parent categories. When a category is clicked, it uses the taxonomy archive template (taxonomy-downloadcats.php) and what I am trying to do is use conditional to say if there are child categories, display a list, otherwise show a list of posts.

In my taxonomy-downloadcats.php at the moment I have the following:

<?php 
$term = get_queried_object();

$children = get_terms( $term->taxonomy, array(
'parent'    => $term->term_id,
'hide_empty' => false
) );
// print_r($children); // uncomment to examine for debugging
if($children) { // get_terms will return false if tax does not exist or term wasn't found.

echo 'show child categories';
} else {
    if (have_posts()) :
    while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
    <li><?php the_post_thumbnail('post-image'); ?>
    <a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/169046/<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
    <?php endif; ?>
<?php } ?>

The conditional statement is correct as if the category has no children it does show posts and if there are child categories, it displays “show child categories”, I need to know what goes in there to make the parent’s children appear.

Thanks

You are so very close here, you can almost smell it. Here is how you would complete your code:

You already have all your child terms stored in an array called $children. To display these, you simply need a foreach loop. Something like this will do the trick. (You can just extend on this, simply do a var_dump or print_r to get the available objects you can use)

foreach ( $children as $child ) {
    echo $child->name; //very basic, display term name
}

If you need to get a link to the term, make use get_term_link