Working with Page Views

View Creation Step 2: Configuring the rest

Lets you set the title of the view as it will be displayed to end users.

Format

Lets you specify which formatting to use when presenting the retrieved data. Each format has its own settings.

The standard options are:

• Grid
• HTML List
• Table
• Unformatted list

Next to the chosen style, you see a 'Settings' link, which takes you to configuration options specific to that style.

The 'Show' property has a number of options, of which 'Content' and 'Fields' are the two most used ones:

'Content' will show the retrieved content using the display settings associated with the chosen view mode.

Following the configuration in the above screenshot, the retrieved content will be displayed using the Teaser display mode.

→ If you're unclear about Content Type Display Settings or View Modes, please refer to the course chapter on Working with Content Types.

If you've chosen 'Show: content', the next set of options labeled 'Fields' will be grayed out as individual field display settings are taken from the chosen View Mode.

If you were to choose 'Show: fields' rather than 'Show: content', the next set of options labeled 'Fields' would become available.

'Show: fields' lets you choose which exact fields you want to display, and how each field should be styled. This is more work than simply falling back on the View Mode settings when you choose 'Show: content'. On the other hand, you get much more flexibility in configuring each individual field's styling.

Fields

→ We will revisit the 'Fields' options later on, using an example view where we use 'Show: fields' rather than 'Show: content'.

Filter criteria

The filter criteria let you filter the data you retrieve from the database.

If you don't specify any filters, you're instructing to retrieve all the nodes from the database, regardless of the type of content or publication status.

The above example, however, shows two filters that were set based on the initial wizard you used:

• The publication status is set to TRUE (Published: yes)
• The Content Type is set to 'Article'.

This translates to a database query that says: retrieve all Article nodes that are published.

Using these two filters as a starting point, you can add additional filters, such as:

• Only retrieve articles created before 01/01/2020
• Only retrieve articles where the author is 'Eva Morales'
• Only retrieve articles where the title contains 'refugee'
• Only retrieve articles where the image is not empty
• ...

You can add as many filter criteria as you want, but be aware that ALL conditions must be met. In the above example this means nodes where the Content Type is Article AND where published = yes.

Sort criteria

Similarly to the Filter criteria, the sort criteria let order the data retrieved from the database before it's shown on screen.

The above example shows that the retrieved data is to be ordered by creation date ('Authored on'), showing the most recent ones first ('Desc' is short for 'Descending').

If you were to remove this sort criterion and replace it with 'Title', you would be able to order the list alphabetically by title, with 'Ascending' resulting in A → Z, and 'Descending' resulting in Z → A.

You can add as many sort criteria as you want:

• The first sort criterion will be the main sort criterion.
• The second criterion will only be used for those nodes with the same value in the first criterion.
• The third criterion will only be used for those nodes with the same value in the second criterion
• …

Example:

Assuming you add the following sort criteria:

• 'Authored on (Desc)'
• 'Title (Asc)'

The retrieved nodes will be ordered by creation date, most recent first. Each set of nodes with the same creation date will subsequently be ordered alphabetically.

Page Settings

Lets you specify:

• where visitors can reach this path (similar to when you specify a path alias for a node)
• a menu item (similar to specyfing a menu item for a node)

The 'Access' setting lets you limit access to this view based on roles or permissions. We won't go into detail here.

Note:

• If you are creating a view with a 'Block Display' instead of a 'Page Display', this set of options would be name 'Block Settings' instead of 'Page Settings'.

Header

Lets you display certain things above the retrieved content.

This is most often used to print a block of text above the view, but you can also use it to insert the output of another view here, though that is a more advanced operation we won't discuss in this course.

Footer

Lets you display certain things below the retrieved content.

This is most often used to print a block of text below the view, but you can also use it to insert the output of another view here, though that is a more advanced operation we won't discuss in this course.

No results behavior

Lets you specify text or insert the result of another view in case your view's configuration doesn't contain any results.

This is most often used to display a user-friendly block of text that tells the visitor there view did not return any results. If you don't display text when the view is empty, visitors will only see the View's title and a lot of empty space.

Pager

Lets you specify how many items you want to show per page, and lets you display the number of result pages, similar to a set of Google search results.

Advanced