Question

I’ve got a random cached view that I need to access the elements of without displaying it to get the order into a session for some next/prev buttons to work.

When I output the view using views_get_view I get totally different results to the actual display. Any ideas?

 $view = views_get_view('hotels_view');
  $view->set_display('block'); 
  $view->render();
  print sizeof($view->result);
  $counter = 0;
  foreach ($view->result as $result) {
    echo 'Result: ' . $result->nid . ' -- ' . url( 'node/' . $result->nid, array('alias' => FALSE)).'<br />';
    $counter++;
    //$_SESSION['hotels_listing'][$counter] = url( 'node/' . $result->nid, array('alias' => FALSE));
 }

Answer 1

I have not tested this locally, so just some speculations:

First up, I’m not sure if this changed from D6 to D7, but IIRC, the display ids always have a number attached, so I’d expect the need to use ‘block_1’ instead of just ‘block’.

Further on, looking at the render() function, it expects the display id as a parameter. If I read the code correctly, it will not check for the id set via $view->set_display(), so this might lead to a different (namely the default) display being used, which would result in a different cache result being used.

So you might try again like so:

 $view = views_get_view('hotels_view');
  $view->render('block_1');
  print sizeof($view->result);
  $counter = 0;
  foreach ($view->result as $result) {
    echo 'Result: ' . $result->nid . ' -- ' . url( 'node/' . $result->nid, array('alias' => FALSE)).'<br />';
    $counter++;
    //$_SESSION['hotels_listing'][$counter] = url( 'node/' . $result->nid, array('alias' => FALSE));
 }

In case that works, you might also want to save some processing time by omitting the rendering, as you are only interested in the query result order, not the actual output:

 $view = views_get_view('hotels_view');
  $view->execute('block_1');
  [...]