Table of dynamic and static content?

Question

With Drupal and views you can generate a table with for example a list of users and their contact details.

Let's say I have a user outside of the system that I want to add to the table statically, what's the best way to do this in Drupal?

The ways I am thinking of are:

Write a module that db_select or use enityfieldquery into an array, add the external user info and put it through theme table and outputs it on a page.

Override the views template and add the user info there.

Are there better ways?

Answer 1

Low level way is to use hook_query_alter - with it, you can add UNION with anything.

More direct Views way is hook_views_post_execute:

This hook is called right after the execute process. The query has been executed, but the pre_render() phase has not yet happened for handlers.

Adding output to the view can be accomplished by placing text on $view->attachment_before and $view->attachment_after. Altering the content can be achieved by editing the items of $view->result.