Question

Is there a way i can have an exposed filter wherein the user can select the number of items displayed by the drupal view?

Answer 1

I am nearly positive that you can do this with hook_views_pre_build (&$view). I know for a fact that you can mess with $view->pager to update whether to use the pager or not and to alter the number of items per page.

This is a snippet from a custom module I did:

if (is_numeric($perpage) && (int) $perpage > 1) {
  $view->pager["items_per_page"] = (int) $perpage;
} else if ($perpage == "all") {
  $view->pager["use_pager"] = false;
  $view->pager["items_per_page"] = 0;
}

I suspect you can turn the pager off and also set the items per page to limit the results.

EDIT:

OK, just saw the part about the exposed filter. The code snippet is actually from a bit of code that simulates an exposed filter for this case. The page has some links on it to select the number of items per page. The links refresh the page, and tack on a perpage=whatever parameter. The hook then sanitizes the input, and basically runs the code snippet above. I have also done something similar using HTML a select, and then wiring up the parameter w/ refresh using jQuery.