stream view paginates on total number of messages in a users log, even if a viewing user has no access to see some

I was thinking it might be possible to exclude all fields from the View, put in a views custom field with php to check for node access and return an empty row unless the user has it.

Was this sort of method dropped because of having to run a mini-query per row?

In case it helps anyone before this architecture review comes in, I hacked apart Ezra's code to come up with code for a views custom field (and I know, I'm using a method that's really not efficient in this scenario, but I'm no programmer so it was the best I could come up with, if anyone can neaten it up I'd appreciate it!). All you have to do is download views_custom_field module, exclude the message field from view, and add this in a custom field:

<?php 
if ($data->activity_log_messages_target_type == 'node') {
$query_restricted = db_query(db_rewrite_sql("SELECT DISTINCT(n.nid) FROM {node} n WHERE n.nid IN (". db_placeholders($data->activity_log_messages_target_id)
 .")"), $data->activity_log_messages_target_id);

while ($result_restricted = db_fetch_object($query_restricted)) {
      $nid_visible[$result_restricted->nid] = $result_restricted->nid;
    }
if (in_array($data->activity_log_messages_target_id,$nid_visible)) {
print '[message]';
}
}
else {
print '[message]';
}
?>

You'll also need to patch views_custom_field with the code here http://drupal.org/node/810190#comment-3109330 in order to enable rendering of tokens (The $data variable on each views row does include a message cache variable with a rendered view of the field which you could use instead and not bother patching customfield, but there are characters at the start and end you'd have to trim off.)

There's already an infinite pager module http://drupal.org/project/views_infinite_pager

I'm not totally sure how this would work though when some pages will appear empty, I'm presuming that it still does pagination, it's just that the pages are offered up differently?

Just discovered my method doesn't work... It does the same job in terms node access but still the problem with pagination... I was sure that Views was capable of omitting a rows from its pagination that are totally devoid of output... but seems I must be wrong.

Edit: Of course if I'd been less of a numpty and looked at this first I could've saved myself the effort http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes--pager.inc/function/pager_query/6

For info, there is already a patch for the infinite pager module to automatically load the next page #968626: Automatically load next 'page' which I suppose could work quite well.

For me, the footer issue isn't a great one, but I can see how for others it would be. I suppose one possibility would be to have a 'floating' footer if you see what I mean, so that it's always at the bottom of the screen.

Is it not possible to have a Views relationship that links activity to nodes, so that the pagination could be dealt with in the query?

It sounds like this re-architecture is something that will take awhile, but as activity logs have become the 'one stop shop' of Commons, this, along with #1256754: Node posted into 2 groups, activity stream only reports on first group and #1292122: Email digests not being sent means that the one stop shop is often making the shop look quiet when it might be thriving, and quiet is never a good thing at all for a web app of this sort, and so not good for Commons.

Using ajax in terms of #968626: Automatically load next 'page' and this issue seems like a good bet to me to compensate for an inadequate pager_query, until that can be rectified.

Just to let those interested know that http://drupal.org/project/views_infinite_pager works really well for filling up a page that's been split into a silly number of empty or partially filled pages.

You don't actually have to patch it, the functionality for autoload has already been committed.