Question

I’m trying to create my own custom format output of Views. I’ve had partial success with this code:

my_module.module:

<?php
function my_module_views_api() { // your module name into hook_views_api
  return array(
    'api' => 2,
    // might not need the line below, but in any case, the last arg is the name of your module
    'path' => drupal_get_path('module', 'my_module'),
  );
}
?>

my_module.views.inc:

<?php
/**
 * Implementation of hook_views_plugins().
 */
function my_module_views_plugins() {
  $path = drupal_get_path('module', 'my_module');
  return array(
    'style' => array(
      'my_module' => array(
        'title' => t('my_module'),
        'handler' => 'views_plugin_style_default',
        'theme' => 'my_module',
        'theme path' => $path . '/theme',
        'theme file' => 'my-module.tpl.php',
        'uses row plugin' => TRUE,
        'uses row class' => TRUE,
        'uses grouping' => TRUE,
        'uses options' => TRUE,
        'type' => 'normal',
      )
    ),
  );
}
?>

theme/my-module.tpl.php:

<?php
/**
 * @file views-view-unformatted.tpl.php
 * Default simple view template to display a list of rows.
 *
 * @ingroup views_templates
 */
 if (!empty($title)): 
   print $title; 
 endif; 
 foreach ($rows as $id => $row): 
 ?>
 ROW:
 <?php
 print_r($row);
 endforeach; 
 ?>

The above is successful in that it will use my custom my-module.tpl.php to output rows. However, the rows are pre-formatted, presumable by the views_plugin_style_default handler. I’ve spent hours trying to create my own such handler, with no success, either placing it directly in the views/plugins directory or in my module’s own plugins directory. I also can’t find any good examples online and I don’t get any useful error messages to help me debug.

Is there any proper documentation on how to create a custom views handler? Or can you provide a working example?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

There is a tutorial here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10129. Scroll down to “Writing Views 2 style and row plugins”. In the tutorial example, they create both a style and a row plugin.

As an alternative, I tried creating just a style plugin, similar to yours except I set ‘uses row plugin’ to false. I was then able to access the raw rowdata from within my views-view-myplugin.tpl.php template.