Drupal - Views. Setting a filter programmatically - drupal

Question

I hope this is not a stupid question I have been searching for most of the day!
I have a Content Type (Documents) which simply contains a title, file and a category. The category value is required and is 'powered' by Taxonomy.
I now wish to create a view which will display these documents grouped and titled by the taxonomy term.
Using my limited Drupal knowledge I intent to iterate through the relevant terms IDs (using taxonomy_get_tree($vid)) and then render each view accordingly.
To do this I have been hoping to use this snippet.
view = views_get_view('documents');
$view->set_display($display_id);
$filter = $view->get_item($display_id, 'filter', 'field_dl_category');
$filter['value']['value'] = $filter_value;
$view->set_item($display_id, 'filter', 'field_dl_category', $filter);
$viewsoutput = $view->render();
But this is not working; when I query the value of the $filter ($view->get_item($display_id, 'filter', 'field_dl_category')) I get null returned.
Might this be that my filter name is not the same as the CCK field name?
I am using Drupal 7.
Any help much appreciated, I am running out of ideas (and time).

Answer 1

I finally managed to get this working but I took a slightly different approach.
I changed my view and added the relevant contextual filter and then used this function views_embed_view to get at my required results.
If this helps! this is my solution:
$display_id = 'default';
$vid = 7;
$terms = taxonomy_get_tree($vid);
foreach($terms As $term){
$content = views_embed_view('documents', $display_id, $term->tid);
//now we see if any content has been provided
if(trim($content) != ''){
print "<h3>" . $term->name . "</h3>";
print $content;
}
}
In my case the trim($content) returns '' with no data as the view template has been edited, this might not be the case for all.
I am a very new Drupal developer so I'm sure there are much better ways of doing this, if so please do post.

Answer 2

I am going to go ahead and assume that you want to show, using Views, a list of document nodes grouped by the category that they have been tagged with.
There are two (of maybe more) ways by which you can do this in Views 3:
(a) Choose a display style that allows you to select a Grouping field. (You could try the table style that ships with Views by default). Suppose you have properly related the node table to the taxonomy_term_data table through a Views relationship, you could choose taxonomy_term_data.name as the grouping field.
Note that this grouping is done before the view is just rendered. So, your query would just have to select a flat list of (content, tag) pairs.
(b) You could also make use of the Attachment display type to achieve something similar. Show the used categories first in a list view clicking on which will show a page (attachment) with all documents tagged in that chosen category.
To understand how to do (a) or (b), turn on the advanced_help module (which is not a Views requisite but is recommended) first.
For (a), read the section on Grouping in styles i.e. views/help/style-grouping.html and
For (b), read the section on Attachment display i.e. views/help/display-attachment.html
A couple of things about your approach:
(a) It will show all terms from that vocabulary irrespective of whether or not they were used to tag at least one document.
(b) views_embed_view() will return NULL even if the currently viewing user does not have access to the view. So, ensure that you catch that case.

Answer 3

Here's an alternative:
$view = views_get_view('view_machine_name');
$view->init_display('default');
$view->display_handler->display->display_options['filters']['your_filter_name']['default_value'] = 'your_value';
$view->is_cacheable = FALSE;
$view->execute();
print $view->render();
I know you can probably set this using some convoluted method and obviously that would be better. But if you just want a quick and dirty straight access without messing around this will get you there.