Hide link to a Views' view if the view is empty

Question

I have a Drupal 6.14 site with Views module. I have a view and on the primary links I put a link to the view.

There is a way to hide the link in the primary menu only if the view is empty?

Answer 1

I am ready to be contradicted any moment as I never implemented anything like that, however I am under the impression that since views are essentially queries against the DB, you can't actually know if a view is empty until you actually invoke it.

Consider that - given you are speaking about primary links (shown on nearly every page of your site) this might be a serious performance hit, depending on the complexity of the view and on its "cacheability".

You should also consider whether the content of that view can be changed by other users browsing the site at the same time that "our" user: should the view become populated after "our" user has loaded the page, "our" user won't ever know.

As on how to achieve what you want, please see the accepted answer.

HTH!

Answer 2

You could probably do this either via a theme or module implementation of preprocess_page (THEMENAME_preprocess_page(&$vars) or MODULENAME_preprocess_page(&$vars)), but mac above is correct in that views are not known to be empty or not until they are run, so there will be a performance hit.

Within the function, you should have access to the structured primary links array, so you can run the view:

 $view = views_get_view('view_name');
 // Swap out 'default' for a different display as needed. Also, $args are arguments, and can be left out if not applicable.
 $output = $view->preview('default', $args);
 if (empty($view->result)) {
   // The view has no results, alter the primary links here to remove the link in question.
 }

Answer 3

I override views_embed_view() to only provide output if there is content, and then call my override from the theme layer:

function mymodule_embed_view($name, $display_id = 'default') {
  // handle any add'l args (this hook supports optional params)
  $args = func_get_args();
  array_shift($args); 
  if (count($args)) {
    array_shift($args); 
  }
  $view = views_get_view($name);
  $output = $view->preview($display,$args);
  if ($view->result) {
    return $output;
  }
}

Then in the template file:

<?php 
  $view = mymodule_embed_view('view_name');     
  if (strlen($view) > 0) {
    print $view;
  }
?>