Add anchor links as children elements in custom nav walker

1

Hi there,

I know this is more of a Wordpress related question, but since I don’t have much experience with custom walkers, I thought I would ask it here too;

I would like to automatically add anchor links from a loop in the parent page as a dropdown submenu with a custom menu walker but maintain the nice and clean Roots output.

I use Advanced Custom Fields to add extra content blocks in a page, in each block there is a named anchor that should be added to the parent page as a submenu.

What I changed so far in the display_element function:

function display_element($element, &$children_elements, $max_depth, $depth = 0, $args, &$output) {
	// Add anchors as children elements
	if ($depth == 0){
		$elementid 	= $element->ID;
		$objectid 	= $element->object_id;
		// Get subitems
		$subitems = get_field('sub_items', $objectid);
		if ($subitems) {
			// Construct child array from anchors									
			foreach ($subitems as $item) {
				$item_title 	= $item['sub_item_title'];
				$item_anchor 	= sanitize_title($item_title);
				// Create new Array for each item
				$children_elements[$elementid][] = array(
					'post_title' 	=> $item_title,
					'post_name' 	=> $item_anchor,
					'post_type' 	=> 'nav_menu_item',
					'menu_item_parent' => $elementid,
					'object' 	=> 'custom',
					'type' 		=> 'custom',
					'type_label' 	=> 'Anchor',
					'title' 	=> $item_title,
					'url' 		=> '#'.$item_anchor,
					'attr_title' 	=> $item_title
				);							  
			}
			//print_r($children_elements);
		}	
	}
	$element->is_dropdown = ((!empty($children_elements[$element->ID]) && (($depth + 1) < $max_depth || ($max_depth === 0))));
	if ($element->is_dropdown) {
		$element->classes[] = 'dropdown';
	}
	parent::display_element($element, $children_elements, $max_depth, $depth, $args, $output);
}

The normal output of the $children_elements would be like this:

Array (
    [7] => Array (
            [0] => WP_Post Object (
                [ID] => 124
                etc ...
                [current_item_parent] =>
            )
            [1] => WP_Post Object (
                [ID] => 125
                etc ...
                [current_item_parent] =>
            )
            [2] => WP_Post Object (
                [ID] => 126
                etc ...
                [current_item_parent] =>
            )
        )
)

But my output of the $children_elements is like this:

Array (
    [7] => Array (
            [0] => Array (
                [post_title] => 'anchor title'
                etc ...
                [current_item_parent] =>
            )
            [1] => Array (
                [post_title] => 'anchor title'
                etc ...
                [current_item_parent] =>
            )
            [2] => Array (
                [post_title] => 'anchor title'
                etc ...
                [current_item_parent] =>
            )
        )
)

So the children elements are in an Array and not in a WP_Post Object.
What do I need to change in order to add the anchors correctly without needing to create new nav_menu_item in the database?

Any help is welcome!
Thanks

2

I got it. I only had to change this:

// Create new Array for each item
$item_args = array(
	'post_title' 		=> $item_title,
	'post_name' 		=> $item_anchor,
	'post_type' 		=> 'nav_menu_item',
	'menu_item_parent' 	=> $elementid,
	'object' 		=> 'custom',
	'type' 			=> 'custom',
	'type_label' 		=> 'Anchor',
	'title' 		=> $item_title,
	'url' 			=> $parenturl.'#'.$item_anchor,
	'attr_title' 		=> $item_title
);
// Convert Array into Object
$children_elements[$elementid][] = (object) $item_args;
1 Like
3

Thanks for posting the solution.