How do I programatically create and display a one-off view?

Question

I am programmatically generating views based on an entity with varying fields and saving them with $view->save(). Just to be clear, I have to do this because my entities have x-amount of fields, and the view needs to display all the fields.

I am thinking that creating all these views in the database might not be a good long term plan, especially when I go into the Views UI, and see a billion views there.

Can I create a one-off view (e.g. typical Views export code producing a block), and print its block to a page without saving it?

Answer 1

I figured it out myself in the end - by looking at how Views does it itself in views_block_view().

function page_callback($my_entity) {
  //create view
  $view = new view();

   ... //Do all the views creation stuff e.g. code in export view

  $display_id = 'block_1';
  $view->new_display('block', 'Block', $display_id);

  if ($view->access($display_id)) {
    $output = $view->execute_display($display_id);
    views_add_block_contextual_links($output, $view, $display_id);
    $view->destroy();
    return $output;
  }
$view->destroy();
}

The above code renders a view that is created from scratch and never saved to a database. If you wanted to do a page you could look at the code in views_page().