Drupal question: Views, arguments and nodequeues

Question

Hello :) I posted this same question on a drupal-oriented site, but didn't get any replies at all. I grumbled to myself and wished that the site was more like StackOverflow, so I thought, why not try asking it here :)

I'm playing around with a view that displays nodes belonging to a taxonomy term. The vocabulary also has a taxonomy nodequeue with subqueues for all the terms.

So far the view has one argument, taxonomy term ID, and is sorted by post date. But what if I wanted to display all of the nodes of a particular term, with all the nodequeue nodes on top, and all the non-nodequeue nodes (but still under this particular taxonomy term) below, sorted by date?

To clarify, say this is my vocabulary, we'll call it 'living stuff'

Plant
--Fruit
--Vegetable
Animal
--Fish
--Dinosaurs

The following nodes are found under Dinosaurs:

Tyrannosaurus Rex (added 2009-01-01)
Megalosaurus (added 2009-01-02)
Velociraptor (added 2009-01-03)
Brachiosaurus (added 2009-01-04)

Since tyrannosauruses and velociraptors are extra awesome dinosaurs, they're also added to the nodequeue living stuff, subqueue dinosaurs:

The subqueue:

1. Velociraptor
2. Tyrannosaurus rex

The final view should display them in this order:

Velociraptor (it's first in the NQ)
Tyrannosaurus Rex (2nd in NQ)
Brachiosaurus (of the remaining dinosaurs, this is the newest)
Megalosaurus (oldest non-queue dinosaur)

I created a relationship to a nodequeue, but it wouldn't let me pick a subqueue, I could only limit to the 'living stuff' nodequeue. My first view argument is term ID, so I thought that if I added "Nodequeue: subqueue reference" as the second argument, I'd get the expected behavior, but this only shows the dinosaurs listed in the nodequeue.

Any help or suggestions on this problem would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

I haven't really tried much with nodequeues' subqueues, so I'm not completely certain of this. But from my experience with nodequeues, it seems like when using views, you are limited to the basic things they support and can't really do the type of customization you are looking for. I think your best bet, would be to create your own views sort handler, where you can sort it like this. It will probably be quite tricky to make such a handler, since you have to figure out both views and nodequeues in order to make it work. You should really give it some thought if it would be worth it before venturing down that path, unless you have done this sort of things with views before.

Answer 2

Hacky solution warning!

Have your primary view in your page with the nodequeue items.

Create another view which is exposed as a block for the non nodequeue items. Put this block in the main content region and limit it to only show on URLs which are the same as the first view.

You may have to do some fiddling with the url variables but I think it will work.

Answer 3

More hacks:
A work-around for the behavior your trying to accomplish might be to forgo using nodequeues at all. I'm not sure the entire impetus for using the nodequeues nor the importance of dates, but faced with similar issues before, I've been able to tackle it using the following:

1. Sticky
2. Modified dates

If you sticky your super-cool dinosaurs, and modify the published dates of the elements so that they match your order, you could produce what you're looking for in a single view. It's sorta hokey, and it's predicated on not really caring about publishing dates (something that always depends on situation) nor having a more pressing reason for using a nodequeue. That said, if you don't need the nodequeue or the dates, it's a workable solution.

The 2-view solution by Jeremy should be workable, too, and I'd say that's another common way to handle the given scenario.

Answer 4

Why don't you concatenate the views behind each nodequeue? (each nodequeue generates a view) You can add a header (see 'Basic Settings' in view edit page) to the second nodequeue that contains php code that invokes views_embed_view('first nodequeue') (you just need to change the header's input format to 'php'). Or rather, create a custom view that includes each nodequeue by invoking views_embed_view(). This would effectively place one nodequeue on top of another, and if they are of the same format/content type you don't even need to mess around with fields: you can use Row Style == Node. As far as your arguments, they can be passed to views_embed_view, as the third parameter (the docs don't say that AFAICR, but I found a post in the forums (http://drupal.org/node/99721) that indicated args can be sent as '$current_view->args' to the view being embedded).

HTH