Inserting Views

If you are investigating the use of the Views module, and would possibly like to embed content from a view into regular node content, there are a couple contributed modules that can help you out:

• The Insert View module acts as a filter in Drupal that can be enabled for various input methods.
• The Viewfield module adds on a field type for your CCK nodes, and allows you to select the desired view.

A more advanced option is to embed a View by hand with PHP. This can be done in the node edit page (if you are using an input method with the PHP evaluator filter enabled) or via PHPTemplate in your theme's .tpl.php files.

First, we would use views_get_view($view_name) to create a view object, then we'd use views_build_view($type, &$view, $args = array(), $use_pager = false, $limit = 0, $page = 0) to display it. Note: both of these functions are provided in views.module, please see that file for additional usage documentation.

Basically, all that views_build_view requires is a type value (we'll be using 'embed') and a view object. The optional variables include an array of views arguments, an option to output the view in pages, how many results to return (or how many results to return per page), and which of the returned pages to start on.

As a simple example, I can edit a node and embed a view into it with the following code:

As a more complex example, let's assume that I want to embed a view on all nodes of a specific type but have different results returned based on the node's title. One way to do this would be to place the following code in your node-type.tpl.php file:

You can also build a view in different ways:

page

Produce output as a page, sent through theme. The only real difference between this and block is that a page uses drupal_set_title to change the page title.

block

Produce output as a block, sent through theme.

embed

Use this if you want to embed a view onto another page and don't want any block or page specific things to happen to it.

result

Return an $info array. The array contains:

• query: The actual query ran.
• countquery: The count query that would be run if limiting was required.
• summary: True if an argument was missing and a summary was generated.
• level: What level the missing argument was at.
• result: Database object you can use db_fetch_object on.