How can one determine if a view is empty using views_embed_view()?

Question

I need to add a header to the page markup if a call to views_embed_view() retrieved any content, and hide it if not. Unfortunately, an empty view produces this markup:

<div class="view view-related-content view-id-related_content view-display-id-block view-dom-id-a62e1bda4cd2427adcbfba7ad95dec6e">









</div>

(I've left the spacing in to be as accurate as possible).

The view is set to hide results when the argument for the (only) contextual filter is not present.

How can I determine whether the view actually has any results, without incurring any extra DB overhead?

I'm looking to do this just with API functions as overriding templates for something so trivial is not palatable. I'm also not looking for any hacks (e.g. measuring the length of the return string and hiding the header based on that).

Answer 1

views_embed_view() does something along the lines of this:

function views_embed_view($name, $display_id = 'default') {
  $args = func_get_args();
  array_shift($args); // remove $name
  if (count($args)) {
    array_shift($args); // remove $display_id
  }

  $view = views_get_view($name);
  if (!$view || !$view->access($display_id)) {
    return;
  }

  return $view->preview($display_id, $args);
}

and views_get_view_result() does something along the lines of this:

function views_get_view_result($name, $display_id = NULL) {
  $args = func_get_args();
  array_shift($args); // remove $name
  if (count($args)) {
    array_shift($args); // remove $display_id
  }

  $view = views_get_view($name);
  if (is_object($view)) {
    if (is_array($args)) {
      $view->set_arguments($args);
    }
    if (is_string($display_id)) {
      $view->set_display($display_id);
    }
    else {
      $view->init_display();
    }
    $view->pre_execute();
    $view->execute();
    return $view->result;
  }
  else {
    return array();
  }
}

so you could combine them to make your own custom module embed like this:

function YOURMODULE_embed_view($name, $display_id = 'default') {
  $args = func_get_args();
  array_shift($args); // remove $name
  if (count($args)) {
    array_shift($args); // remove $display_id
  }

  $view = views_get_view($name);
  if (is_object($view)) {
    if (is_array($args)) {
      $view->set_arguments($args);
    }
    $view->set_display($display_id);
    $view->pre_execute();
    $view->execute();

    if (!empty($view->result[0])) {
      return $view->preview();
    } else {
      return FALSE;
    }
  }
  else {
    return FALSE;
  }
}

(D6 code above, D7 is quite similar)

Answer 2

You could use views_get_view_result() which returns an empty array if the view has no result to display.

Answer 3

I had the exact same problem. This is what i did -

$view = views_get_view('view_name');
$print_view = $view->preview('display_id', array('argument1','argument2'));
if(!empty($view->result)) {
  print $print_view;
}

Hope that helps somebody.

Answer 4

With help from the posts by Jimajamma and bsfoo116, here's the straight up short answer:

$checkempty = views_get_view_result('my_view_name', 'my_display_name');
if (!empty($checkempty)) print views_embed_view('my_view_name', 'my_display_name');

Answer 5

A lighter weight solution is to simply search the output for the text 'views-rows'. If there are no results, this text generally wont be rendered (though of course it will vary based on your specific configurations).

I was able to successfully use this in one of my projects to make sure a block got hidden appropriately.

$block['content'] = views_embed_view('volumes', 'default', $group_id);

if(strpos($block['content'], 'views-row') === false){
    $block['content'] = false;
}

Obviously the other solutions listed here are more complete, but this is a quick and straightforward way to do it.