In this tutorial I'll show how you can programmatically and dynamically remove a column from your view. In my example, I chose to hide an email column from unauthenticated users, but you could apply this code to do pretty much anything.
To get things started, I defined a content type of "Profile" to contain some user details (using the Content Profile module) and used the Devel module's generate users and nodes functionality to create some sample data. I then created a view to show the data:
Here is my page view display:
Now you can add the hook_views_pre_build() function in your module. Since the $view object is large, I recommend using krumo() (which comes with the Devel module) to browse through the $view object's properties.
<?php
function MYMODULE_views_pre_build(&$view) {
// check for your view name (in my example: people)
if ($view->name=='people') {
krumo($view);
}
}
?>The above code will neatly format the $view object in a hierarchical display. You can click to expand each class property.
As you can see, the $view object has a lot of data in it. At this point, you'll need to get acquainted with the structure of the handler object of the view ($view->display['default']->handler) and determine what to modify. To remove the email column for unauthenticated users, you can add the following code:
<?php
function MYMODULE_views_pre_build(&$view) {
// check for your view name (in my example: people)
if ($view->name=='people') {
// check if the user is anon
if (in_array('anonymous user',$GLOBALS['user']->roles)) {
// remove view hander properties for email column
unset(
$view->display['default']->handler->options['fields']['mail'],
$view->display['default']->handler->options['style_options']['columns']['mail'],
$view->display['default']->handler->options['style_options']['info']['mail']
);
}
}
}
?>When I logout, my view no longer shows the email column:
