How do I show only 3 of the latest posts for each term in a view?

Question

With the help of another question: Show newest nodes for each taxonomy term in Views I have been able to create the view I require, except that it displays all posts for each term (grouped by term)? How do I limit each term to display only 3 of their latest posts.

e.g.

Term 1
- Post 1
- Post 2
- Post 3

Term 2
- Post 1
- Post 2
- Post 3

Term 3
- Post 1
- Post 2
- Post 3

Answer 1

If you need only one node you can use “Representative node” relationship. But if you need three nodes per each term, use something like Views Field View.

1) Create "child" view for content. Something like this:

Add taxonomy term argument, pager limits, sorting and etc:

Now you can attach this view to another one.

2) Create taxonomy view:

Add hidden term ID field and then add “Global: View” field:

Don't forget to configure caching. From Views Field View page:

It's highly recommended to use this module in conjunction with views caching. Views Content cache and Cache Actions are good ways of caching views.

Answer 2

Upon further investigation, it seems like Peek Summary might be exactly what you want. The screenshots on the documentation are for Drupal 6, and it's slightly different in Drupal 7, so I've attached some updated screenshots.

• Choose Peek Summary from 'Contextual Filters' > 'When the filter value is not in the URL' > 'Display a summary' > 'Format'

• You'll see a view of sub-views. Click on the gear next to the pager for the group you'd like to limit.

• Enter the max items to display on the pager options.

You'll have to edit the pager for each and every group you'd like to limit, which is unfortunate. When you edit the pager for one group, it changes the settings for all groups. If you want to display a number of nodes per group different than the total number of groups, override that in the 'Format' settings under 'Contextual Filters' (on first screenshot in purple).

It has the disadvantage of essentially creating [n] views for [n] groupings, which could be a performance issue depending on how many groupings you have, but it does limit the query to only the number set to display. This could improve your performance, depending on your use case. As always, cache responsibly.

Answer 3

A way to limit this in code would be to add something like the following to a custom module:

function custom_views_pre_render(&$view) {
  //get the rows from the view just before render
  $results = $view->result;
  //create a counter
  $count = '';
  //we're going to built up a new $result array
  $new_results = array();
  //iterate through each view row
  foreach($results as $result) {
    //find the taxonomy term
    $term = $result->taxonomy_term_data_name;
    //add the term to a string of all the terms we've seen so far
    $count .= $term;
    //make sure to separate them with spaces to make them easier to count
    $count .= ' ' ;
    //count how many rows have the same term as the current one
    $term_count = array_count_values(str_word_count($count, 1));

    if($term_count[$term] <= 3){
      //if this is the third or fewer row with this term, add it to the new result array
      $new_results[] = $result;
    }
  }
  //instead of the normal view output, only show the results we put in our array.
  $view->result = $new_results;
}

This is for a view of taxonomy terms that is connected to nodes via a relationship. If you just have a view of nodes, your mileage may vary.

Though it prevents the display of more than 3 per term, this will not prevent the query from returning all the results for each term, so it doesn't improve SQL performance at all. If you have a very large number of results for each term, making separate view panel displays and putting them all in one region using something like CTools Page Manager so you're not running huge queries.

As always, you're going to want to cache this stuff on production.