Posted 04.20.2010 by Jack
Presented by Larry Garfield (Crell) of Palantir.net
The Views Stack
- Views are a three-part stack - how Crell explains to clients
- bottom of the view is the What Level - what data am I looking at - narrow down your entire database to what you want using filters, args, fields, sorts, and relationships
- middle is How level - how data is displayed - styles, flows, pager, and area
- top is Where Level - Display (e.g. block, page, panel content pane, RSS feed) - also now includes Access and Exposed Form
- this maps to the Views UI
Views Plugins
- themable: display, style, row style, pager, exposed form
- non-themeable (logic and functionality): access, argument default, argument validator, caching, query
Types of Handlers
- Fields (Views fields, not CCK fields) - SELECT part of query
- Filters - WHAT part of query - condition that's hard coded into the view, though users can change the conditions
- Arguments - a contextual filter, the value of which is built dynamically by something in the environment. By default on a page display that's pulled from GET but doesn't have to be in other display plugins.
- Sorts
- Relationships - essentially a JOIN to grab fields from a variety of different base entity types, lets you do a lot of amazing queries more prettily than you can do with your own SQL queries
- Area "plugins" - new in Views 3, should be plugins but handlers - replaces Header and Footer text from Views 2, but now this is pluggable
(left session)