Drupal Views - How to return information about a view that is being rendered - drupal

Question

I'm having trouble dealing with hooks for the Views module in Drupal. What I'm trying to do is determine which view is being rendered so that I can identify it and make changes to it. IOW, I don't know ahead of time which view I'm working on.
In the code below, I've replaced my actual module name with "MODULENAME".
In my .module file I have included a file MODULENAME.views.inc file with the following:
include_once ( dirname(__FILE__) . '/MODULENAME.views.inc');
In the .views.inc file, I have a MODULENAME_views_api function like this:
function MODULENAME_views_api() {
return array('api' => 2, 'path'=> drupal_get_path('module', 'MODULENAME'),
);
}
Those seem to work just fine. So, now I try to get down to business with an actual hook...
function MODULENAME_views_pre_render(&$view) {
$get_view_info = $view->name;
echo $get_view_info;
}
MODULENAME_views_pre_render();
The problem is this throws an error, "Missing argument 1 for MODULENAME_views_pre_render().
So, obviously it expects me to pass in an identifier of some sort to tell it which view I want. But that's the whole point of this function is to determine which view is being rendered. If I knew the answer to that, then I wouldn't need to call the function in the first place.
Am I missing something obvious? Is there a function call that I can use to return this identifier?

Answer 1

You hook into things by implementing hooks, so this part of your code is ok:
<?php
function MODULENAME_views_pre_render(&$view) {
$get_view_info = $view->name;
echo $get_view_info;
}
But this:
<?php
MODULENAME_views_pre_render();
Why? You're not generating a view, Views is. It's not your job to invoke the hook. You just implement it.
So, you need to make changes to the view? you do it right there:
<?php
function MODULENAME_views_pre_render(&$view) {
if ($view->name == 'TheViewIWantToModify') {
// Make some changes to the $view
}
}
And that's it.
Also, note that depending on the type of modifications you want to do, you might want to implement another hook instead of hook_views_pre_render(). Take a look at the docs/docs.php file that comes with Views (version 6.x-2.12 at least, I don't know which version you have, and BTW you should indicate this) and starting on like 538 you'll see a few hook_views_pre_ and hook_views_post_ type of hooks (that is, their descriptions, for you to know what each of them are good for), and then you can decide which one to implement in your module.