Drupal Views api, add simple argument handler

Question

Background: I have a complex search form that stores the query and it's hash in a cache. Once the cache is set, I redirect to something like /searchresults/e6c86fadc7e4b7a2d068932efc9cc358 where that big long string on the end is the md5 hash of my query. I need to make a new argument for views to know what the hash is good for.

The reason for all this hastle is because my original search form is way to complex and has way to many arguments to consider putting them all into the path and expecting to do the filtering with the normal views arguments.

Now for my question. I have been reading views 2 documentation but not figuring out how to accomplish this custom argument. It doesn't seem to me like this should be as hard as it seems to me like it must be. Leaving aside any knowledge of the veiws api, it would seem that all I need is a callback function that will take the argument from the path as it's only argument and return a list of node id's to filter to.

Can anyone point me to a solution or give me some example code?

Thanks for your help! You guys are great.

PS. I am pretty sure that my design is the best I can come up with, lets don't get off my question and into cross checking my design logic if we can help it.

Answer 1

It's not as easy as you would like to make it.

In views, arguments are used to return objects, fx user, node, term, custom object. So you could make some custom code, to get the "query object". That would only be first step. You then need to get the info from the query object. You could either try making a custom relationship bond with the nodes or build your own filter to make the SQL needed. This can quickly become a confusing time sink.

Instead, I would suggest that you use hook_views_query_alter, which will allow you to alter the query. Since you already have the SQL, it's just a matter of checking for the hash, and if it's there, alter the query. Should be a pretty simple thing to do. Only thing that is a bit tricky, is that you have to make the query with the query object that views uses, but it's not that hard to figure out.