girishmuraly [girishmuraly]

Hello,

I am providing my module 'views_dynamic_fields' for review. I would like to release this as the first beta. I have a list of Todos for now, like a wishlist.

1. When a view is already created with some fields' 'exclude from view' property set, they are still being included in the exposed dynamic fields filter. Need to find a way to distinguish default excluded fields from the ones that the user actually chooses.
2. The exposed form uses checkboxes, which needs proper testing since views_handler_filter.inc converts checkboxes to selects since checkboxes don't work well in exposed forms due to GET conversions

Thank you,
Girish

Sure, more motivation:

Assume we have the following requirements:
We as an administrator of a large corporation have to create a report 'sales_analysis' for the company executives to access periodically to view how well their products are being adopted in the market. This report will be accessed by various departments - sales, marketing, engineering and others. The report additionally needs to have the ability to be exported as an XLS.

We then decide to create this generic report having a lot of fields to satisfy the eyes of all departments. So this view ends up containing too many fields (which for example's sake are limited to):
* Product
* Technical Specs
* Product Engineer
* Country
* Marketing Campaign
* Gross sales

(For the XLS export feature, we decide to use the already available views_export_xls module http://drupal.org/project/views_export_xls, which allows the view to be downloadable as an XLS file. For this, we need to create a 'feed' using 'XLS Feed' style and attach it to either the default or page display - please see the module for more information on how to configure that).

Now when a sales executive looks at this report, he/she is not interested in the Tech Specs and/or the Product Engineer. But at the moment there is no way to dynamically exclude those fields just for that instance of that view for that user. Unfortunately, these unwanted details get carried over into the XLS file he/she generates for the Sales team, which would be used in their weekly board meetings. The Engineering team on the other hand do not care about the Marketing campaign used or even the gross sales, when they look at this view.

The only alternative for the poor developer would be to create multiple views with different fields to cater to each departments' requirements - one each for Sales team, Product team, Marketing etc. That would be a waste of effort and provides too much redundancy and changes to the core view query would have to be effected to each of the different views.

It would have been so much simpler if we had one generic view and then presented the user with a list of fields of that view along with checkboxes for the user to pick and choose which fields they wanted to see (and also export to the XLS) for that instance.

The proposed module 'views_dynamic_fields' creates a filter that allows for dynamic selection of fields. These will also hold true for the XLS download when configured with the views_export_xls module. Hence a user can choose the fields they want to download into their XLS module.

Other features of this module include the ability to either 'select' or 'deselect' fields (exclusion mode). If a view has a large number of fields and we need to remove just 1 or 2 from the display, then the selected fields can be chosen to be 'excluded', rather than 'included' by default. Screenshots attached. Unfortunately I do not have a website where I can demonstrate this. I would like to take this forward seeing the community adoption and features requested by others as well.

Please let me know if you would like additional details.

Thank you for your time!

Adding additional screenshot which shows the user having chosen only certain fields for display (using the example screenshot attached in my previous comment).

@jjwhitney Thanks.

Still looking out for reviewers to approve a CVS account for me!

@kiamlaluno Would you think the extra information provided below would suffice for me to get a CVS account?

@kiamlaluno Thanks for the review comments. I have made the changes below. Please review and tell.

1. Removed the license file.

2. Completed the TODOs.

3. Removed the empty installation file.

4. Reformatted code and ran it through coder.

5. Created a better readme file.

@kiamlaluno Hi, do you have any other review comments on this? Just asking since I did not want to give up hope of getting a Drupal CVS account as I really want to contribute good stuff. This ticket has been left inactive for more than week!

Cheers

Thanks kiamlaluno