A gotcha with custom applications

NB: This post was written about Sitecore V6.6 – if you're using Sitecore 7.5 you should look at the updated version instead.

Ever gone through the steps to create a new Application in the Sitecore "Start Menu", but had it not appear despite refreshing? I wasted an hour of my afternoon scratching my head over this issue recently, so I thought I would write down what I went through in case anyone else hits the same issue...

When you search on SDN for info on creating the menu items for an Application you come up with this: Creating an application. The information is written about an old version of Sitecore, but it's still generally accurate even though I was working with version 6.6. According to the docs:

First you create an entry under /sitecore/content/Applications in the Core database to represent your application:

And then you create an Application Shortcut entry somewhere under /sitecore/content/Documents and settings/All users/Start menu in the code database to represent the application shortcut in the start menu:

And then you refresh your browser. And nothing new appears in the menu...

I spent quite a bit of time going back over all the settings before finally spotting the issue. When you compare the data shown in the images from the SDN article with what's in the Sitecore 6.6 UI:

The subtle issue is that when you use the "Insert link" button for the "Application" field, it has added a ".aspx" extension to the end of the link despite having picked it from the content tree. I'm guessing that internally this data is being processed as if it was a path inside the Sitecore UI code. Hence the ".aspx" breaks it and your menu item doesn't appear. As soon as you edit the text of the field to remove the extension it all starts working:

Hopefully that little tip will save someone some hassles...