Connecting views to another Drupal database

Question

I have a need to display views using an old Drupal database. These views are already created, so I exported them and dropped the export code into a custom module hook_views_default_view, put in the necessary return, changed the view name, updated the paths, etc. So, now I have two Views showing exactly the same dataset.

I need the newly created one to query against an old database; both databases have exactly the same structure. I have the old database setup in settings.php and, I thought, all I needed to do was add $view->database = "oldlife". That's not working - I'm getting the exact same data in both views (two different paths).

This is the code, minus all the handlers and unnecessary stuff:

function lwg_old_db_views_api() {
    return array(
            'api' => 3,
            'path' => drupal_get_path('module', 'lwg_old_db'),
    );
}

function lwg_old_db_views_default_views() {
    $view = new view();
    $view->name = 'commerce_vbo_views_orders_oldlife';
    $view->description = 'Display a list of orders for the store admin.';
    $view->tag = 'commerce';
    $view->database = 'oldlife';
    $view->base_table = 'commerce_order';
    $view->human_name = 'Orders';
    $view->core = 0;
    $view->api_version = '3.0';
    $view->disabled = FALSE; 
    /**
      * many lines of $handler-> stuff
      */
    $handler = $view->new_display('page', 'Page', 'page_1');
   $handler->display->display_options['path'] = 'list-all-nodes';
   $views[$view->name] = $view;
   return $views;
}

Answer 1

Have a look at this module, it can do the job for you.

https://www.drupal.org/project/web_widgets

Answer 2

It's $view->base_database, not $view->database.