Template Views enable us to create pages with much more flexibility compared to the conventional view layout. Recently, I tried switching a GridView to a TemplateView so I was able to style the layout with more control over the DOM. The only issue was, I lost the ability to select items displayed in my view. I knew TemplateViews have a mouse down property, but I still wasn't able to get the selection object.

I was trying to figure out how to show/hide Drupal table columns in a View using checkboxes to select which columns are visible. Most of my research (aka asking around) slash googling was pointing towards jquery but I wanted to stay away from the whole .js route. So after some trial and error I was able to come up with this solution... Step 1: I used hook_form_alter to add checkboxes to the View's exposed filter form. Each checkbox represents a header/column in the view table.