What is the proper way to set the route to a menu item from within a component?

Question

So I'm working on my a new component and I want to be able to route to a menu item when access is denied for a certain action.

I created a menu_id field in my table and I'm using the menuitem form field type to store the menu itemId.

I thought that I would be able to use the controllers setRedirect function like so

if($isRestricted && !$canDownload)
{
    $msg = $this->translate('COM_BABELU_PRODUCTS_DL_NOT_AUTHORISED');
    $this->setRedirect('index.php?itemId=101', $msg, 'warning');
    return false;
}

However it didn't work. it just appended the item id to the route

http://mysite.com/previous-menu-item-alias?itemId=101

This didn't even load the view associated with the menu item with the ID 101.

Do I need to specify the entire route? I.E. lookup the link from the #__menus table and then call JRoute with that value?

If anyone has exp with this I would really appreciate any information.

----Edit --- I've done this before by querying the #__menus table directly and getting the link value then pushing that into JRoute. However I don't like the idea of querying the table directly because it creates a direct dependency. What I really want to know is how to get the link value without touching the #__menus table, or if there is a way to direct to a menu item using only the itemId.

Answer 1

Okay. I found the answer.

First to get the item information without querying the #__menus table use this code:

$app = JFactory::getApplication();
$menu = $app->getMenu();
$item = $menu->getItem($itemId);

Now the redirect is a little difficult, because I want to use the proper route, but if I just send the route to JRoute, I end up with an error because JRoute just appends the url content to the current active item. The below example is being called from the controller.

Example:

 //current url = http://mysite.com/product
 //$item->route = my-page 

$this->setRedirect(JRoute::_($item->route));
$this->redirect();


//resulting url = http://mysite.com/product/my-page

This of course throws a 404 because this route doesn't exist. "product" is part of my component "my-page" is a com_content article item.

However you can get around this by adding the URI:

$route = $item->route;
If((int)$item->home === 1)// its the home menu item, so clear the route
{
    $route = '';
}

$this->setRedirect(JURI::base().$route);
$this->redirect();

// resulting url = http://mysite.com/my-page

I also tested this with the $item->link vs the $item->route and it seems to work the same. It is probably better to use the link, just in case the site isn't using search engine friendly URLs.

I hope this helps!