slaug's blog http://pingv.com/blog/870/atom/feed 2008-02-22T11:07:36-06:00 Combining different views using views offsets http://pingv.com/blog/slaug/200802/view-offsets 2008-02-22T11:07:36-06:00 2008-02-22T11:07:36-06:00 slaug We recently had a client that wanted to have two different teaser treatments for a node type on their homepage: The first node would show more content, while the other nodes would have less content displayed. This is common for displays where you want, for example, a highlighted top post with more abbreviated lower posts.

We approached this using two views. The top view would return the top node of the view, while the second view would return everything but the most recent item, while displaying different teasers. The first view was easy: simply the most recent node of that type that had been published.

The second view, however, was created by using two functions from the views module and placed in the page-front.tpl.php file:

  1. views_get_view($view_name)
  2. views_build_view($type, &$view, $args = array(), $use_pager = false, $limit = 0, $page = 0, $offset = 0, $filters = NULL)

We used views_get_view() to get the view object for the view and set it to a variable:

<?php
$second = views_get_view('Secondary_topics');
?>

Next we used the views_build_view() to display the view on the home page:

<?php
print views_build_view('embed', $second, array(), FALSE, 5, 0, 1);
?>

We stated the type as embed because the view is being embedded in a page. The the next parameter, $second, is the views object, which was returned by the views_get_view function.

To achieve the goal of getting five teaser views starting at the second most recent topic, we set the $limit parameter to 5 and the $offset parameter to 1.

For the other view that only displays the most recent node topic we used the same two functions, but set the $limit parameter to 1 in the views_build_view function:

<?php
$first = views_get_view('Front_Page');
print views_build_view('embed', $first, array(), false, 1);
?>

We placed both of these steps into the page-front.tpl.php template in the appropriate places to display the content on the page and in the order that is needed.

Now the new issue is this: both contents look the same because the views are both calling the same node.tpl.php file and there is no flag to check for which view is being used.

To resolve this issue we used the global variable $current_view as a flag. The $current_view variable is an object that contains the name of the view being used ($current_view->name). We placed the $current_view variable at the top of the node.tpl.php template file. Next we used a conditional statement (if..elseif..else) to have the node.tpl.php file display different content for each view on the same page.

<?php
global $current_view;
?>

This displays content for the first topic view on the front page, but not for the other view on the front page:

<?php if(($current_view->name == 'Front_Page') && $is_front): ?>
This will only display in the first view on the front page.
<?php endif; ?>

I hope this helps other Drupal users. If anyone else has come across this and did it a different way, please share.

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