CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I want to use the Joomla send article link function to also be able to create a mailing in civimail.
I added a checkbox for that. So if the user checks it, then he/she will be redirected to the first step of the new mailing.
The trick is that when the user gets to the mailing wizard, the mailing should already have been created and the Joomla article content added as html_body for the mailing.

This doesn't sound that hard to do, right?
I created ArticleToMailing.php to the civi bin directory. In that file i have the following code:
<?php
session_start();
require_once '../civicrm.config.php';
require_once 'CRM/Mailing/BAO/Mailing.php';

$articleId=CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'article_id', $_REQUEST);
$query = "SELECT introtext FROM jos_content WHERE id = $articleId";
$dao =& CRM_Core_DAO::executeQuery( $query, CRM_Core_DAO::$_nullArray );
$dao->fetch( );

$params['body_html'] = $dao->introtext;;
$params['created_date'] = date('YmdHis');
$params['name']=CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'subject', $_REQUEST);
$params['created_id']=CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'user_id', $_REQUEST);

$mailing = CRM_Mailing_BAO_Mailing::create($params, $ids);
?>
Nothing complex really.
I don't get any error messages and the mailing is added to the database.
BUT the mailing doesn't show up in the drafts so I cannot edit it.
What am I missing?

I've asked this before - but how are you supposed to know what the required parameters are for any given function? It doesn't seem right that you should have to unpick the code to figure it out but the standard for documentation appears to be just to give the name of the array.

How do the wise ones of the core team know - what's the secret because I'm sure it's not reverse engineering the code to figure out what must be passed in.