How do I create a node from a cron job in drupal?

Question

In a custom module for drupal 4.7 I hacked together a node object and passed it to node_save($node) to create nodes. This hack appears to no longer work in drupal 6. While I'm sure this hack could be fixed I'm curious if there is a standard solution to create nodes without a form. In this case the data is pulled in from a custom feed on another website.

Answer 1

The best practices method of making this happen is to utilize drupal_execute. drupal_execute will run standard validation and basic node operations so that things behave the way the system expects. drupal_execute has its quirks and is slightly less intuitive than simply a node_save, but, in Drupal 6, you can utilize drupal_execute in the following fashion.

$form_id = 'xxxx_node_form'; // where xxxx is the node type
$form_state = array();
$form_state['values']['type'] = 'xxxx'; // same as above
$form_state['values']['title'] = 'My Node Title';
// ... repeat for all fields that you need to save
// this is required to get node form submits to work correctly
$form_state['submit_handlers'] = array('node_form_submit');

$node = new stdClass();
// I don't believe anything is required here, though 
// fields did seem to be required in D5

drupal_execute($form_id, $form_state, $node);