View menu routes missing until first page load

Question

I having an issue with the installation logic of a custom module. I am trying to add menu links using menu_link_save() that link to a view that is defined in my module in hook_views_default_views().

I am creating a new site using a installation profile that installs this custom module by default. I'm not sure if this is related to being in the install/update environment instead of the normal page environment.

The problem I am having is that the view hasn't created any route in the menu_router table. When I add a link I get a row in menu_links, but the router_path column is empty and the row gets deleted by Drupal when it decides to rebuild the menus.

Is there way to cause the view to populate the menu_router table so that I can add links normally? Is there another way I can use for this? I would like to be able to keep my profile and, rely on a single site install action instead of having to do something after installing, as follow up.

The link never appears; Drupal deletes it from the menu_links table.

Answer 1

Problem background

I actually found an answer to this problem. Drupal has a rather aggressive way of deleting menu items that has the router_path field set to NULL (or empty) in table menu_links. If Drupal finds such a record it will delete the record upon the next run of menu_rebuild(); (see docs) or documentation block below.

/**
 * Populates the database tables used by various menu functions.
 *
 * This function will clear and populate the {menu_router} table, add entries
 * to {menu_links} for new router items, and then remove stale items from
 * {menu_links}. If called from update.php or install.php, it will also
 * schedule a call to itself on the first real page load from
 * menu_execute_active_handler(), because the maintenance page environment
 * is different and leaves stale data in the menu tables.
 *
 * @return
 *   TRUE if the menu was rebuilt, FALSE if another thread was rebuilding
 *   in parallel and the current thread just waited for completion.
 */

Solution

Each menu item created this way must contain the property customized and have its value set to to 1. This forces Drupal to update the record in table menu_links with the matching router_path instead of deleting it. See function _menu_navigation_links_rebuild($menu) around line 2929 in menu.inc. _menu_navigation_links_rebuild($menu) is called from menu_rebuild().

Example

This will create a new link on the top level in a menu named 'your-menu-name'.

$ls = array(
  'menu_name' => 'your-menu-name',
  'link_title' => 'Your Link Title,
  'link_path' => 'your/link/path',
  'plid' => 0, 
  'weight' => 0, 
  'customized' => 1, // "The magic property"
);

$newpid = menu_link_save($ls);