How to preserve the location of custom reports in the navigation menu?

Question

Newbie dev question. I have created custom navigation menus in the CiviCRM UI as a way of categorizing the dozens of custom reports (SearchKit + Afforms) my client requires.

I'm finding, however, that when I clean up the Civi cache (Administer > System Settings > Cleanup Caches and Update Paths > Cleanup Caches button) it ALSO resets the location of all the reports back to the Reports menu.

• How can I preserve the location of the custom reports in the navigation menu?

• Is there a way to turn OFF the "report reset" or to decouple it from "cache clearing"? The developer documentation here doesn't shed any particular light on this issue.

I have tried creating "subfolders" under the "Reports" menu, but even then the custom reports all get pulled out of the subfolders and dumped back again under the root "Reports" menu.

This is incredibly frustrating.

How am I supposed to organize for the users 80+ custom reports in the top navigation if they get reset every time the cache is cleared?

Should I be going about it differently?

Are there other ways of organizing lists of custom reports (ones I've built in SK and FormBuilder) into one or more "report list pages" for users to access? Since I'm on Drupal I could create pages there to organize and link to the Civi reports, but it seems odd not to be able to do that within Civi.

Thanks!

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Civicrm 5.65.0 Drupal 10

Answer 1

Any menu item you create through FormBuilder is controlled by FormBuilder. So every time you clear the caches, the menu item goes back to wherever it is set in FormBuilder.

Option one is to change the parent and order in FormBuilder for each menu item.

Option two is to remove the menu item added in FormBuilder and add the form as a menu item manually (Navigation Menu > Add Menu Item and paste in the URL). This is nice as you can now edit the menu as you would normally, but if you delete the form, you'll still have the menu item.

I agree that this is very frustrating and made an issue for this behaviour a while ago. Might be worth chiming in there to add your voice in support of improving this.