Is there a better way to build this joomla url?

Question

So far I'm re-inventing the wheel here in the most uncomfortable way. I can feel in my gut that this will break one day and cause me a lot of pain. Therefore I'm looking for a better way to take an article alias and build either the menu item url or the article url. Are there no joomla api calls that make this easier/cleaner/more future-proof?

/* Find article by alias */
$db =& JFactory::getDBO();
$sql = 'select id from #__content where alias=' . "'$alias'";
$db->setQuery($sql);
$row = $db->loadAssoc();
$artId = $row['id'];
if ($artId != null) {
  $artLink = 'index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id='.$artId;
  /* Find menu item by article id */
  $sql = 'select parent,alias from #__menu where link=' . "'$artLink'";
  $db->setQuery($sql);
  $row = $db->loadAssoc();
  $menuLink = '';
  while ($row != null) {
    $menuLink = '/' . $row['alias'] . $menuLink;
    $sql = 'select parent,alias from #__menu where id=' . $row['parent'];
    $db->setQuery($sql);
    $row = $db->loadAssoc();
    }
  $menuLink = 'index.php' . $menuLink;
  }

$articleUrl = ($menuLink != '') ? 'index.php' . $menuLink : JRoute::_($artLink);

Answer 1

Use JRoute? Assuming you're still starting with an alias, a more 'Joomla' way do this could be something like:

/* Find article by alias */
$db =& JFactory::getDBO();
$sql = 'select id from #__content where alias=' . $db->quote($alias);
$db->setQuery($sql);
$row = $db->loadAssoc();
$artId = $row['id'];
if ($artId != null) {
  $articleUrl = JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=' . $artId);
}

Docs for JRoute here: http://api.joomla.org/Joomla-Framework/JRoute.html

This also gets around SQL escaping issues that you could get if there were quotes in your alias ;o

I should also mention that if you want the menu link specifically - you need to have the '&itemid=' bit on the end of the path passed to JRoute! Of course, you can't get that itemid from the alias - there can be multiple menu items pointed to the same article ;).