I have standard basic article content type which, amongst other things, contains an image field which is configured to contain an unlimited amount of values.
I'm now trying to create a view that lists some of the fields in this content type but I want to limit the number of images that are returned for this specific field to 3 random images in the list (or less). Is this something that can be achieved right in my view configuration or do I need to do something ninja? I'm not aware of everything that's possible php wise to "rewrite" / "filter" the results of my view but I'm confortable with anything programming related.
I'm using drupal-7 with Views 7.x-3.0-alpha1
Thanks!
AFAIK there is no way through the Views UI to randomize the selections of a grouped field.
I can see two possible ways, in theory to achieve what you want.
Use hook_views_query_alter to alter the SQL query for the view. I'm not sure Views support what you need to randomize the results, but you have the ability to alter the query that views generates, and might be able to randomize it.
Select all results, but using theming to only show the randomly selected options. This could be done in a preprocess function. Views provides several, depending on your display option, hook_views_view_unformatted might be what you need.
Related
My Task: I have content type which have 100+ different mostly numeric fields (big questionnaire for NGO with yearly reports). For one field I can use Views module to let user select which reports include (for example one year) and display it as nice graph (using for example Views+Charts). I would have to define about 100+ nearly identical views, which differs only by what field data they use.
My Question: Is there any way how to reuse one view definition and just change data from which field id display?
Solutions so far: I found two not really good solutions:
Create one view, export it (using Features or similar way) and then clone this export, rewrite field it uses as source and than add. But this just speed up creating one view for each 100+ fields.
Use module Views Dynamic Fields - it allows user to select which fields to display. But I would still have separate definition how to display for each field, so not much better than add one view for each 100+ fields.
I suggest writing your own Views field display plugin! This is actually all documented within the Views module folder: views/docs/views.api.php. Depending on your fields I'm not sure how you would exactly connect the data to the view.
Another alternative would be to just use a PHP Code field, and figure out a way to programmatically display the data from the field you wanted. The downside to this is that you wont be able to use that field to sort/search on with any filters as far as I know.
I have a problem. I have a view that is getting back no results like it should, for the context it is in. I have a list of resources (file nodes) that are associated to an organic group. For this view I use exposed filters that should only show filter options that apply to the result set.
For example, if I have only one "folder" associated with this group then I should only see one folder in the exposed filter for folders. If I have none then none should show up. The problem is that when we have none it is showing ALL the folders for the site. Same with the associated topics and other filter fields.
Currently we are using the views_hacks > views_filters_selective module to accomplish the initial filtering. But it doesn't seem to handle the case when the view has no results. And I am having trouble figuring out how (and where) to identify when it has no results so that I can just eliminate all the filter options.
Now to be a little extra honest about this, we actually copied some of the functions from the above mentioned module and improved it (for performance purposes) within a custom module we wrote. But like I said, I am having a tough time trying to identify when the view has no initial results at all.
Does anyone have any idea as to how to do this? We are running this in Drupal/Pressflow 6 with Views 3.
It turns out I just needed to set it to not empty for that field and it works fine.
I'm doing a project for a surveying company in Drupal 6. Ultimately, employees will need to enter measurements into a new content type. Currently they do it in a big Excel spreadsheet that has a bunch of macros to do calculations between cells (Meters to Feet, m^2, some pricing stuff).
My question is:
How would one go about replicating the functionality of this spreadsheet best in Drupal 6, keeping in mind the amount of data the employees using this system gather varies between projects (I.e., 3-floor house versus 1-floor with basement; etc.).
I have two ideas so far:
Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Sheetnode's CCK functionality to drop Sheetnode CCK fields to replicate the spreadsheet exactly. Use Views to display this data other ways.
Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Views (and possibly something like Views Calc) to get varying measurement values.
That said, I'm completely open to suggestions outside of these two implementations.
Thank you!
I dont have an answer so much as a caution. I did a project where a number of pieces of content were rendered simultaneously on a page, each piece being in its own node. The down side to multiple nodes is the performance hit you will take having at least one (possibly complex) query per node.
So in this case, if there were many many lines in the sheet, and each line was a node, you might take a pretty heavy performance knock.
This might be acceptable - but I thought I'd give you the heads up.
This might be one of those times where its best to actually create a purpose-built mechanism on-top of the Drupal API instead of using nodes+CCK.
Like I said, I could be being over cautious. It depends on your exact usecase.
HTH!
This seems like the kind of question http://drupal.stackexchange.com was made for...
I ended up doing this with jQuery, Measured Value Field and Flexinode; see: Auto-updating width/length/area using jQuery and Drupal6
I have a CCK field price which the user can fill in. I would like to create a search form with dropdown price field with different ranges (such as below 100$, 100$-1000$, more than 1000$). The problem is that the user input is an integer so I cannot achieve range search using filter exposure. The user would have to specify the exact value to perform searching, but this is rather useless. Is there a way ( amodule, etc) to create ranges out of integer values so that the user is able to perform range based search?
Obviously people grab views and CCK for most solutions. But often a small module sith just a hook_menu(), a calback and a theme function will suffice.
In that callback you can perform whatever complex query you want.
Such modules, most of the time, contain less then 100 lines of PHP.
If you know PHP such a functionality might take you less then an hour to build. Whereas writing addons and behaviours for CCK and Views often costs much more.
The advantage of building views and CCK addons, is that your code is better re-usable.
The way I did it in the past was to use hook_form_alter to change that field to a select drop down range (a min and max drop down), then alter the views query if a value was provided.
The other way to do ranged facets would be to explore Apache Solr integration or Search Lucene facets. Keep in mind that its not exactly plug n play tech, though.
To sort out out your price into various categories you need to create a CCK Select list and then populate the list automatically using the Rules module. You need to also hide this select list using content permissions.
I've created a mini-case study on graphing using Rules & Views. As part of the mini case study, it shows you how to categorize the cost field using Rules -- which is precisely what you want. It also shows you how to hide the field using content permissions. Please check the below link for a video:
http://www.noparrots.com/content/mini-case-study-creating-a-bar-chart-in-drupal
Suppose I have a list of a couple of thousand organizations and a user needs to be able to select one of them. The list is too large to populate in a dropdown at page load, and the user often knows what they want but it's not the first part of the organization name. That is, they know "Collections" but not that the precise name of the organization is "Department of Collections". So the user will need/want to type in some information.
It's easy enough to use an autocompleting textbox of some kind, but I don't want to allow the user to type in random text - they have to choose one of the organizations explicitly.
What's the best solution?
IMO I will simplify the UI to:
a textbox to enter the string
a drop down to set the filter options like: "contains | starts with | ends with"
a button "Find"
Then, I will populate a view based on the search string & let the user choose the valid item or refine the search
IMO with something like an auto-complete, you will end up writing a lot of parsing code to get to the string & then there might be server-side load considerations...
HTH.
In additional check if 'facetted navigation' is something you need. Ref.: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/design-patterns-faceted-navigation/
So it seems to me your main challenges are to
Express that the user needs to select an organization from the list (and only from the list).
Express that there are a lot of organizations on the list.
Provide some means for the user to quickly find the organization on the list.
I would say present a selector control that fits in with the rest of your design with a search box just above it. You should then page the list as there will be lots of pages with that many elements indicating that the user should definitely use the search. The search essentially acts like the auto complete, but instead of the found options changing the text, it will change the contents of the paginated list. If you do this on a character by character basis (or throttle using Reactive Extensions), it's very clear that you're just filtering the list to make selection easier.
You could use a CustomValidator to ensure that the TextBoxes content in contained in your collection.
You could use the Ajax AutoComplete Control: http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/AutoComplete/AutoComplete.aspx. You can opt to only do a lookup if the user has typed in a certain number of characters.
You'd create a static Web Method to query the collection (you could use LINQ) and return matching organizations.
You'd obviously need to validate the textbox input afterwards.
Is it possible to structure your list a bit more like a tree, so that it is not a single list. E.g. Could you have a grouping like "Government Depts" and then add Dept of Collections to that. Then ask you users to first select the top level grouping then show them a shorter lists of organizations in that group?
It sounds to me as if your data list should really be in either a database or at least stored well away from the UI.
Wherever its really stored, place a keyword for each entry, say "Collection". The list of keywords could be available as part of your auto-complete functionality. Then search on the keyword alone.
If you could divide items in categories, would using some kind of tree control help?
So, when user clicks on a node you load only items in that node. And so on.
I'd break it into two paths...
Use an autocompleting textbox, for the person who types the correct title (i.e., Department of Collections); and a separate search button to search for possible matches. The search button would take you to a results page to select the desired choice. This functionality would be similar to the way search on MSDN works.
Initially a tree view sounds cool, but are you certain that a single classification will reduce the data into manageable sets? If 80% of your data gets classified as "government dept" this doesn't really help things.
The problem is you want criteria that allows users to quickly split a large list into smaller sets that are easier to consume. Additionally, there should be enough flexibility to react to changes in data.
I'd suggest using a tagging pattern like iTunes. In my library "rock" describes 80% of my collection - but is still a useful categorization for something like random shuffle. I also have the ability to stack tags so I can use genre="rock", decade="1990" and quickly sift my data down to whatever is of interest.
In the UI, I'd recommend a section that allows the user to apply "filters" which is nothing more than selecting specific values for tags. Break the list out into pages and allow them to see a tally of potential matches.
Scenerio:
- Navigate to screeen XYZ and see there are 10,000 companies to pick from
- Click "classification" and select "Government dept" and the list updates to indicate there are now 1,000.
- Click "region" and select "South" and see my list drop to 200.
- Sort list by name and then select (or scroll through, whatever)