Building a website I recently ran into an issue where I had HTML search facets interacting with Drupal views. The user would click on the facet and it would filter the view depending on the argument. I ended up implementing hook_views_query_alter. To make sure the values I wanted to filter on were in the view, I added the search facets into the view as fields. This automatically joins the necessary tables so that you don’t have to.

Implementing hook_views_query_alter requires two parameters, view and query, both are passed by reference. Since this hook is called for every view the first thing I did was check that I was altering the right query by adding an if statement that checks the view name. After that you're free to modify the query as you wish. In my example, I looped through the search facets and added them as where statements and arguments to the query.


function search_views_query_alter(&$view, &$query) {
  if($view->name == 'example_view_name'){
    foreach($parsed_url AS $key => $value){
      $query->where[0]['clauses'][] = 'profile_values_profile_' . $key . '.value IN ("%s")';
      $query->where[0]['args'][] = $value;
    }
  }
}


One of the search facets was a taxonomy filter which the user was allowed to multi select. In order to get the view to grab the correct values, I had to add join clauses to dynamically create term_node table aliases. This is done by adding a join clause to the table_queue and tables array elements within the query object. I was able to just copy the existing term_node table_queue and tables array elements because I only wanted to create different aliases. Then I incremented the existing term_node table count within the tables array. If you wanted to create a new table join dynamically, the same approach is used but the table_queue and tables definitions need to be created by hand.


foreach($parsed_url AS $key => $value){
  $vid = _search_get_vocabulary_id(str_replace('_', ' ', $key));
  $tid = _search_get_term_by_vocabulary($vid, $value);
  $table_term_node_join = $query->table_queue['term_node'];
  $query->table_queue['term_node_' . $count] = $table_term_node_join;
  $query->table_queue['term_node_' . $count]['alias'] = 'term_node_' . $count;
  $query->tables['term_node']['count']++;
  $query->where[0]['args'][] = $tid->tid;
  $query->where[0]['clauses'][] .= 'term_node_' . $count . '.tid = %d';
  $count++;
}


The query table_queue and tables array elements looks like so:

Table Queue:


'table_queue' => array (
  'term_node' => array (
    'table' => 'term_node',
    'num' => 1,
    'alias' => 'term_node',
    'join' => views_join::__set_state(array(
      'definition' => array (
      'left_field' => 'vid',
      'field' => 'vid',
      'table' => 'term_node',
      'left_table' => 'node',
    ),
    'extra_type' => 'AND',
    'table' => 'term_node',
    'left_table' => 'node',
    'left_field' => 'vid',
    'field' => 'vid',
    'type' => 'LEFT',
    'adjusted' => true,
    )
  )


Tables:


'tables' => array (
    'node' => array (
      'node' => array (
      'count' => 1,
      'alias' => 'node',
      ),
    'term_node' => array (
      'count' => 1,
      'alias' => 'term_node',
    )
  ),
);


In my book this makes views more comfortable to use because it gives me more control over them. This along with a view preprocessor allows me to style and output pretty much anything I want within a view.

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