Accessing Views 2 in an External Script
I just finished a quick project that had the following requirements:
- A PHP based application needs to output content from a Drupal installation that lives elsewhere on the same server. For the purposes of this discussion, lets pretend we will be adding a "Recent Blog Posts" item to an e-commerce site that pulls directly from Drupal.
- The Drupal content must be nicely formatted, and fairly easy for the site administrators to alter.
My solution used the views_embed_view() function for Views 2.
The Drupal site already had Views 2 installed, so the first step was to point and click my way through making a new "Recent Blog Posts" view (called "recent_blog_posts" in our example). The view settings were pretty standard -- filter by node:type and node:published, sort by node:sticky and node:post-date, and set the output style as an HTML list. Should the site administrators wish to change the number of items output, etc. at a later date, they can easily do so from the Views UI.
The next step was to update the external script to load this view for display in the external application. Thanks to Drupal's drupal_bootstrap() function, and the Views 2 views_embed_view() function, this can be accomplished with a scant four lines of code.
<?php
// Change to Drupal root directory
chdir('/path/to/drupal/');
// Optional error reporting during development (turn off for production sites)
// error_reporting(E_ALL);
// Bootstrap Drupal
require_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
// Output the view
print views_embed_view('recent_blog_posts');
?>
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Comments
#1 A Few Updates
Submitted by Eric Weik on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 21:04.
In cases where your site uses clean urls, and your script exists in a directory outside of the Drupal directory, relative links in your view may not be formatted properly. Relative links passed through Drupal's url() function will include the path to the directory your script exists in (e.g. "node/99" will link to "/path/to/script/node/99") which likely will not work properly.
Here is an updated version of the above script to run a search and replace on such links:
<?php// If Drupal is installed in a subdirectory under DOCUMENT_ROOT, specify it
// here in the form /path/to/drupal/
define('DRUPAL_SUBDIR','/content/'); // Change to Drupal root directory
chdir($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"].DRUPAL_SUBDIR); // Turn on error reporting during development (turn off for production sites)
// error_reporting(E_ALL);
// Bootstrap Drupal
require_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL); // Views 2 output via views_embed_view()
$rawfeed = views_embed_view('recent_blog_posts'); // Replace relative links which may be broken by calls to url()
$search = "href=\"{$base_path}";
$replace = "href=\"{$base_root}".DRUPAL_SUBDIR;
print str_ireplace($search,$replace,$rawfeed); // To fetch nodes without views, see use something like:
// $results = db_query('select nid from node where type="story"');
// while ($result = db_fetch_object($results)) {
// $node = node_load($result->nid);
// echo "Debug (node): <pre>";print_r($node);echo "</pre>";
// }
?>
#2 Clarification of views_embed_view() parameters in 6.x-2.7
Submitted by Eric Weik on Mon, 01/04/2010 - 22:40.
Although I do not specifically discuss this feature in my original post, views_embed_view() accepts additional parameters, one of which changed slightly between 6.x-2.7 and older versions.
Lets first look at the function definition and documentation for views_embed_view():
<?php/**
* Embed a view using a PHP snippet.
*
* This function is meant to be called from PHP snippets, should one wish to
* embed a view in a node or something. It's meant to provide the simplest
* solution and doesn't really offer a lot of options, but breaking the function
* apart is pretty easy, and this provides a worthwhile guide to doing so.
*
* Note that this function does NOT display the title of the view. If you want
* to do that, you will need to do what this function does manually, by
* loading the view, getting the preview and then getting $view->get_title().
*
* @param $name
* The name of the view to embed.
* @param $display_id
* The display id to embed. If unsure, use 'default', as it will always be
* valid. But things like 'page' or 'block' should work here.
* @param ...
* Any additional parameters will be passed as arguments.
*/
function views_embed_view($name, $display_id = 'default') {}
?>
In my original example, we were only using the $name parameter, which pulled the default display of a view. However, if you have a view with multiple displays (e.g. "Default" for the default view, "Some Page View" for a page view, and "Some Block View" for a block), you can load the specific display by passing in $name and $display_id with a calls like:
<?php// Fetch the default view for output:
$defaultfeed = views_embed_view('recent_blog_posts'); // Fetch "Some Page View" for output:
$pagefeed = views_embed_view('recent_blog_posts','page_1'); // Fetch "Some Block View" for output:
$blockfeed = views_embed_view('recent_blog_posts','block_1');
?>
In versions of views prior to 6.x-2.7, you could actually use the human readable name of the display instead of the identifier:
<?php// *** Don't do this, it does not work in Views 6.x-2.7 or later!! ***
$rawfeed = views_embed_view('recent_blog_posts','Some Page View');
?>
However, this is not the correct usage, and after some changes to the display handler, this usage will result in an empty view result.
If you run into this problem, you should simply be able to update to use the proper display identifier ('page_1', 'page_2', 'block_1', block_2', etc.).
For more information, see the following issue: http://drupal.org/node/624144.
#3 I'm getting the following
Submitted by Marion (not verified) on Tue, 09/14/2010 - 11:45.
I'm getting the following error
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare timer_start() (previously declared in /var/www/websites/retire2/includes/bootstrap.inc:230) in /var/www/websites/tblc/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 236
Both my sites are drupal sites. Any idea what the error means?
#4 bootstrap.inc included twice
Submitted by Eric Weik on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 09:29.
Sorry for the long delay on this response - somehow I missed this comment way back in September.
For what its worth, this error was likely caused by bootstrap.inc being included twice (and thus it tried to re-declare the timer_start() function). This can happen when fileA includes bootstrap.inc, and fileB includes bootstrap.inc AND fileA (which also includes bootstrap.inc).
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