Raised Eyebrow Blog

I’m working on a site right now that has a Publications content type, which in turn has a multiple value CCK text field for Author. If more than one author was input I needed them to display as a comma separated list in a view. How do you go about modifying this? My first stop was the theming info link in Views, and that helped me narrow it down to a template file to use, views-view-field.tpl.php(). But that file didn’t allow me to modify the individual fields without getting a whole load of other HTML in the bargain.

< ?php
// $Id: views-view-field.tpl.php,v 1.1 2008/05/16 22:22:32 merlinofchaos Exp $
 /**
  * This template is used to print a single field in a view. It is not
  * actually used in default Views, as this is registered as a theme
  * function which has better performance. For single overrides, the
  * template is perfectly okay.
  *
  * Variables available:
  * - $view: The view object
  * - $field: The field handler object that can process the input
  * - $row: The raw SQL result that can be used
  * - $output: The processed output that will normally be used.
  *
  * When fetching output from the $row, this construct should be used:
  * $data = $row->{$field->field_alias}
  *
  * The above will guarantee that you'll always get the correct data,
  * regardless of any changes in the aliasing that might happen if
  * the view is modified.
  */
?>
< ?php print $output; ?>

Using the brilliant “Theme developer” extension of the Devel module I was able to pin point the theme function – theme_content_view_multiple_field that would allow me to modify the actual value of the field without the wrapper div’s etc (I’m not getting into the views divitis argument.

Here’s a quick snippet of code to place in your template.php file of your theme to allow you to modify multiple value fields:

function custom_theme_content_view_multiple_field($items, $field, $values) {
  $output = '';
  switch($field['field_name']) {
    // If this is the author field then we need to comma separate the authors
    case 'field_author':
      $output .= '<div class="field-item">'. implode(', ', $items) .'</div>';
      break;
 
    default:
      foreach ($items as $item) {
        if (!empty($item) || $item == '0') {
	  $output .= '<div class="field-item">'. $item .'</div>';
	}
      }
      break;
  }
  return $output;
}

I used a switch statement because I have a lot of other multiple fields that need to be themed in different ways and it’s nicer than a whole load of if statements. Also switch provides a default state if a condition isn’t met.

We’ve come across an issue quite a few times during the development/build of a site where a client wants to include some content above or below a view and wants to have the ability to edit that content. There are a number of ways to achieve this functionality:

1. You could simply use the “Header” field in the create/edit view screen and place some text in there. However, that does not have a nice WYSIWYG editor, one could be assigned but it’s not ideal.
2. You could create a block and place it in a region above the view. Again, unless you have a WYSIWYG Editor set up for blocks, this is not perfect.
3. You could, in some way, add a view to the bottom of a page – ah!, that’s it.

The caveat with 1 and 2 above is that it requires giving the site editor/client access to views and blocks, in a lot of cases this is way too much control and will usually result in problems. 3 is the ideal solution. Once I figured this out, I began to develop the functionality: I created a Select CCK select field for all page content types which pulled a list of all available views by using the views_get_all_views() function. This field stored the name of the view, I then used the name of this view in page.tpl.php to load the view via the function views_get_view(). It started to get a little messy, so I decided to start building a module, only to find that one already existed.

It’s called Viewfield and does exactly what it says on the tin. It allows you to add a CCK field which is a list of views to choose from. The view will then display on a page in whatever position and format you choose. It works great.

You can see it in action on this page from the BCNDP website.