How do I add a link to a menu from a module in Drupal 6?

Question

I'm creating a drop down menu with nice menus, but I'm having a problem programatically adding a link to the menu from modules. I have defined the menu in the Administration section under Site Building > Menus and can get it to work fine if I add a link manually, but I can't get any links from modules to show up. Here is my code from module_menu():

  $items['node/%node/jobs'] = array(
    'title' => 'Jobs',
    'page callback' => 'job_applications_form',
    'page arguments' => array(1, 'node'),
    'access callback' => 'job_applications_user_access',
    'access arguments' => array('site_owner', 1),
    'menu_name' => 'menu-dealer-menu',
    'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
  );

The menu's name is menu-dealer-menu. I am using Drupal 6, and upgrading to 7 is not an option right now, and won't be for the next couple of months.

Answer 1

You are using a wildcard in the path node/%node/jobs. If you want Drupal to show a menu link, you have to tell it how to figure out the %node argument. You can do it with a function named node_to_arg.

The function name, actually, is [wildcard]_to_arg. I suggest you change the wildcard to something different, since there are several menu paths with %node in it. If you relied on node_load to return you a node object, you can just call it from [wildcard]_load.

There is documentation on [wildcard]_to_arg and you can see how user_uid_optional_to_arg implements it for the user/%user_uid_optional path.