views

On a recent project, I was struck by how the content editors used spreadsheets to manage their content. This wasn't just as a planning tool in the early stages; they had spreadsheets which essentially mirrored the content in Drupal, and this is where they kept track of who was responsible for sign-off on a piece of content, what stage it was at, and so on.

I've recently had cause to make Views make joins to tables in peculiar ways. Here's some notes on the peculiar things I did with the views_join class to accomplish that.

First of all I'll briefly recap how we define a table to Views. Each item in the $data array returned to hook_view_data() represents all the information about a table. Each key in the array is a field on that table (well, or pseudofield), except for the 'table' key which has the basic data about our table, like this: