By astra on
Action Views is used to execute actions against multiple records displayed by a view: http://drupal.org/project/action_view
Another module Views Bulk Operations allows bulk operations to be made on the nodes displayed by a view: http://drupal.org/project/views_bulk_operations
The basic feature of the two modules looks similar. Is there any important difference between them? Or it doesn't matter, just depends on which you like better?
Comments
Taking a first stab
I'm just looking at the differences myself. (I'm redoing someone else's code which uses action_view, and just stumbled over views_bulk_operations). Here's what I've seen in the past hour or two:
1) The user interface for views_bulk_operations has more possibility for 'refining' the number of actions:
- in action_views, you get a listbox above your view, to select all possible actions which you can perform on the nodes, with a 'next' button. All the actions are there. (I suspect you can only delete some choices that you don't need, writing your own code in hook_form_alter() in a custom module.)
- in views_bulk_operatios, the person building the view must choose the actions he wants displayed. (There's an extra"operations" tab in the view edit screen for this.) These actions will then be displayed in a dropdown box(#) above your view, with an 'execute' button - except if you choose only one action. In that case, there's only one action button below the view, whose text is the action itself.
(#)no functional difference between listbox and dropdown. My UI feeling finds the dropdown more logical / consistent with the rest of Drupal, but oh well...
2) Both modules allow you to do operations that are defined through the 'action API' and hook_node_operations()... but action_views has extra built-in actions, like changing fields (e.g. the title) of multiple nodes at once. (Also taxonomy, user, etc. fields).
(These extra actions are implemented through include files for the action_views module, which are distributed with the module itself. I'm pretty sure they could also be built using one of the other 'standard' Drupal methods, so I'm not totally sure why that needed to be done this way. Anyway, I'm not immediately seeing that these 'multiple field edit' actions are available already through the action/hook system, so that may be a reason to choose action_view if you need these specific actions now.)
3) views_bulk_operations seems to be more widely used and more actively maintained, judging the state of the issues queue (and the number of issues that the maintainer assigns to himself). There's also a fully functional D6 version.
There may be more differences, but I was sold at the first point already (I needed one specific action button), so I'm stopping here :)