How to manipulate some fields using Views PHP?

Question

I'm trying to manipulate some fields on Views with Views PHP.

I have a (term) field for author(s). It can have one author or more.

Normally it looks like as that:

Book Title | Author

My First Book | Name1 Surname1, Name2 Middle2 Surname2

My Second Book | Name3 Surname3

etc.

What I want to do is to print names as that:

Book Title | Author

My First Book | Surname1, Name1 - Surname2, Name2 Middle2

My Second Book | Surname3, Name3

In order to do that, I used Global: PHP field with Content: Authors.

Value code inside Global: PHP is that:

$names = $row->field_authors;
foreach ($names as $name) {
  $parts = explode(' ', $name);
  if (count($parts) == 1) {
    $wanted = print($name);
    continue;
  }
  $last = array_pop($parts);
  $wanted = print ($last  . implode(' ', $parts));
}
return $wanted;

Output code is:

<?php print $value; ?>

But it doesn't return anything. I tried some other similar code but nothing changed.

Is it about the Content: Authors field (multiple field settings etc.) or am I wrong about the code I used in the Global: PHP field?

Answer 1

You'll want to put that code into a view template. Go into your admin, where you can edit that View, click on Advanced, and then Theme: Information. That will give you suggestions on the file naming conventions for the row style output for your view.

But as for your PHP code, Drupal uses a lot of nested multi-dimensional arrays, so it's not as simple as $row->field_authors being an array of strings of author names (unless you're doing some preprocessing). If field_authors is a term reference, you'll need to load the taxonomy term in order to get the actual author name.

This should get you the $names array:

$names = [];
foreach($row->field_field_authors as $author_tid){
   $term = taxonomy_term_load($author_tid[0]['tid']);
   $names[] = $term->name;
}
(... the rest of your code...)

Answer 2

An option you can try is by using the Views Field View module. This allows you to call/render the output of another view as fields in the parent view.

Here we will be creating a View to display your authors. Here's that can generate a simple output of the authors list for a node.

1. Create a view, for the Show setting use Content and uncheck Page and Block.
2. Under the Advanced pane, Add a Contextual filter named Content: Nid. For the settings: (1) Select Provide default value, (2) Type would be Provide default value from URL and set Path component to 1.
3. Under the Advanced pane again, Add a Relationship named Content: Taxonomy terms on node. For the settings: (1) Select the vocabulary you want to refer and check Require this relationship.
4. Under the Format pane, for now we'll just use the Unfiltered List format.
5. Under the Fields pane, assuming your taxonomy author structure has a Last Name field, add (term) Taxonomy term: Last name and (term) Taxonomy term: Name.

This will be the expected output.

Next we need to update the parent view. Before doing this please install the Views Field View module.

1. Under the Fields pane, add Content: Nid. For the settings, check Exclude from display.
2. Under the Fields pane, add Global: View. For the settings: (1) View would be the "Author taxonomy" view (2) Display can just be Master since we didn't create any View Display for the "Author taxonomy" view (3) Contextual filters would be [!nid] which is the node id that we pass into the view so it gets only the "authors" of the current node of the row.

This will be the expected output.

An alternative option though if you like coding is using the Views hooks. You would need to create a custom field or alter and add functionality into the multiple field view handler.

NOTE: Also wanted to stress that placing PHP code inside the database is not a best practice.

Hope this helps or give you an idea.

Answer 3

Based on the answer of the question "How to print taxonomy term name with views PHP?", I could manipulate the term fields as I wanted with that code:

Output Code:

<?php
foreach($data->field_field_authors as $author) {
$term = taxonomy_term_load($author['raw']['tid']);
$name = $term->name;
$parts = explode(' ', $name);
if (count($parts) == 1) {
    print ($name);
    continue;
  }
  // get last word
  $last = array_pop($parts);
  // Print last one, comma, and rest of name
$authorManipulated = ($last .", "  . implode(' ', $parts) . " - ") ;
print $authorManipulated;
}

?>