[development] programmatic creation of node

[Larry Garfield]

Using drupal_execute() or drupal_execute_macro() is a nasty, evil, slow, and 
ugly way to programmatically create users and nodes.  It's also usually the 
only way that will reliably work. :-)  I have, however, run into cases where 
it does not.  For those, I have to fall back to creating the $node object 
myself and saving it.  Fortunately I've only had to do that for one-off 
imports, so I could hard-code defaults.  

There is no real good answer here, not until we get a real Data API in core.  
We're working on it. :-)

On Saturday 08 March 2008, Moshe Weitzman wrote:
> In drupal5, you should call hook_node_submit() and
> hook_nodeapi('submit') before node_save(). that will assure that any
> group info gets saved (for example).
>
> In d6 this is not needed since those submit hooks became
> hook_nodeapi(pre_save) and that happens from within node_save().
>
> drupal_execute is also a valid way. the node_load() is a little
> expensive but this is a very clean way to proceed. if it is working
> for you, i would proceed like this.
>
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 10:53 AM, Novák Áron <aron at novaak.net> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> >  While the development of FeedAPI, i faced with a problem. FeedAPI has to
> >  create nodes programmatically, i believed that this is a really easy
> > thing to do, feedapi now works like this:
> >  $node->data1 = "foo";
> >  $node->data2 = "bar";
> >  node_object_prepare($node); // this is about the default values
> >  node_save($node);
> >
> >  But I got a report that this is not a good way to do:
> >  http://drupal.org/node/196273
> >  Summary:
> >  "node_object_prepare() and node_prepare() functions are meant to
> > simulate the demonstration of a node"
> >  And some users, who use FeedAPI + 3rd party modules together, really
> >  experience bugs around node creation / handling:
> >  http://drupal.org/node/195105 (summary: the core forum module uses
> > form_alter to pass taxonomy-like data. And this data is lost now.)
> >
> >  Can you suggest me a perfect way to handle this problem?
> >  mustafau (http://drupal.org/user/207559) suggested to use
> >  drupal_execute($form_id, $form_values), but in this case, i had another
> >  problem: drupal_execute has no useful return value and $node structure
> >  remains unaltered, so i had to do a node_load after this, which is quite
> >  expensive.
> >
> >  Thanks,
> >
> >  Aron Novak


-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

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