Programmatically creating menu hierarchy in Joomla

Let's say that I have a vast quantity of restaurant reviews in a database -- not Joomla articles, just database tables. I want to display these restaurant reviews as part of a Joomla 1.5 web site.

I can write a component to display each review. That part is fine. But rather than listing the reviews as a list on a page, I want to use the nice cascading menu that is part of the Joomla template that the site uses. But I don't want to have to add menu items one by one for each review; I want menu items to be generated automatically from the database contents. The menu of reviews should 'plug in' the existing menu structure for the web site (i.e., I want to supply the code that generates the menu items with an existing menu item so that开发者_运维百科 it generates itself under that item).

How can I create code to programmatically create that menu? Component, plug-in, module, ...? Would the menu be generated at page display time, or "manually" in the admin panel (I'm ok either way). Any examples of this already?

I think the simplest way would be to create a custom menu module. The absolute basic one would just output the list of reviews in a <ul> and then use some css to style the list.

I ended up creating a component that creates the whole menu structure at once, upon admin request. It just creates rows in the jos_menu table, as if the menus were created manually. Updating the hierachy is a pain (and I haven't completed that part), but creating the structure from scratch is pretty simple and works well.