How to Completely Remake (Delete, Then Add) Menu Items Through Joomla Framework

Question

A couple of previous questions have touched on this topic (how to add menu items, how to hide menu items), but I'm trying to figure out how to remove or empty a menu and then programmatically refill it. It seems like the task has three parts:

1. How do you delete an entire menu? Previous answers to manipulating menu items point to JNestedTable for menu manipulation, but I don't see a function for accomplishing this--only for deleting a generic row from a table using a primary key value. I could do this outside of the Joomla Framework using a SQL query, but I suspect that is the wrong approach (because it will mess up the lft and rgt values):

   DELETE FROM menu WHERE menutype='name'

2. How do you add menu items? I believe this was answered here, but any other thoughts?

3. Once the menu is deleted and new menu items are added, how do you rebuild the menu? I know you can rebuild menus from the backend, but how can you do it programmatically?

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

You are probably best looking at com_menu and studying how core Joomla does it.

For deleting and adding entire menus, you can see the relevant functions at \administrator\components\com_menus\models\menu.php.

Here there is a function called delete, to which you pass an array of menu IDs, and it deletes them one at a time in a foreach loop. It's well commented, though does have the ominous comment // TODO: Delete the menu associations - Menu items and Modules at the end.

It also has a function to save here, which creates or edits menus. Here you pass the relevant data to match the fields at administrator\components\com_menus\models\forms\menu.xml. Send it an id of 0 if it is a new menu.

The rebuild function is found under \administrator\components\com_menus\models\item.php. This isn't well annotated, but it looks like JTable has a function for rebuilding.

This file also has the save function for menu items, which works in a similar way to the way the menu one worked.