Hide a view if there are no results

Question

(Spin-off of Remove/Hide the block if the View is empty?. I find the other question a bit confusing, and want to reduce it to the essential question.)

When rendering a view programmatically, and there are no results, there is still some HTML returned from $view->render().

This can be desirable in the following cases:

• There is a "No results behavior".
• There are exposed filters, which need to be shown independent of the view result.
• The view is using AJAX, so it could happen that new content appears dynamically.
• Perhaps other reasons?

I want to write generic code that renders a view, but completely hides it if there are no results, and no other reason to show it.

So far I have this:

$view = \views_get_view($view_name);
if (NULL === $view) {
  return [];
}
$success = $view->set_display($display_id);
if (FALSE === $success) {
  return [];
}
$view->set_arguments($args);
// See https://www.drupal.org/node/525592#comment-1833824
$view->override_path = $_GET['q'];

$view->pre_execute();
$view->execute();

if (empty($view->result) && empty($view->empty)) {
  // @todo Also check for exposed filters!
  return [];
}

$markup = $view->render();

$view->post_execute();

if (FALSE === $markup) {
  return [];
}
return ['#markup' => $markup];

So the question is: Which other checks should I add when looking if the view is empty? (the place with the @todo).

How do I check if there are exposed filters? Which other criteria are relevant?

Answer 1

Considering how many criteria might have to be considered to determine if a view can be hidden, I decided to make this a configuration option instead.

I see two ways to do this:

• The component where the view is embedded can have a configuration option "Hide view if no results". This is what I went with.
• One could make a symbolic views plugin for "no results behavior", named "Hide view if no results". Then one could implement e.g. hook_preprocess_views_view(), or possibly another hook, to hide the view if the new no results behavior is present.

I could write a lot more details, but for now I want to share the ideas behind these options, maybe this already helps.

I am marking this as the accepted answer. But if someone can come up with something more convincing, I will change it.

Answer 2

You can try to use such construction

if (count(views_get_view_result('view_name', 'display_name'))){
  $markup = views_embed_view('view_name', 'display_name');
}else{
  $markup = "";
}