Fun with Views and Feeds: Sorting feeds based on number of items

Here's a short recipe to sort the results of a view using PHP. The domain of application is sorting feeds in Managing News based on the number of items each feed has.

<?php
// @file mymodule.module
/**
 * Implementation of hook_views_pre_render().
 */
function mymodule_views_pre_render(&$view) {
  if ($view->name == 'myview_name') {
    $nids = array();
    foreach ($view->result as $result) {
      $nids[] = $result->{$view->base_field};
    }
    if (empty($nids)) return;
    $result = db_query("
SELECT feed_nid, COUNT(*) AS count
FROM {feeds_data_syndication}
WHERE feed_nid IN (%s)
GROUP BY feed_nid
    ", implode(',', $nids));
    $counts = array();
    while ($count = db_fetch_array($result)) {
      $counts[$count['feed_nid']] = $count['count'];
    }
    usort($view->result, Functor::create_functor('_mymodule_compare_counts', $counts, $view->base_field));
  }
}

function _mymodule_compare_counts($a, $b, $counts, $base_field) {
  return $counts[$b->$base_field] - $counts[$a->$base_field];
}
?>

You can find the code for class Functor in an earlier post.

Note: Whereas we're currently using hook_views_pre_render to perform this functionality, the more correct approach would be to post-process the view results right after execution. The problem is that hook_views_post_execute does not exist - but it will if this issue goes through!

There's a module for that! Drupal architecture and module development

Fun with Views and Feeds: Sorting feeds based on number of items

Comments

COUNT(*) will be

Thanks, I've changed it here