Custom Drupal Modules and Views

I'm working with a client on a Drupal site where another programmer has implemented several custom content types via a module, not CCK. I'm researching how to integrate this with the Views module, and found this useful information so far.

• http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/views/api
• http://drupal.org/node/148456

The hook of note seems to be hook_views_tables to get the view editing interface to know about the columns in our custom table.

Here is the start of a function to return the information to the Views module. In this example we use product_id as the primary key of our table, which is the same as the node's nid. This only exposes the name of the product to the view, but more columns and tables will be added later.

// hook to tell views about our tables
function mymodule_views_tables() {
 $tables['mymodule_product'] = array(
   'name' => 'mymodule_product',
   'join' => array(
     'left' => array(
       'table' => 'node',
       'field' => 'nid'
       ),
      'right' => array(
        'field' => 'product_id'
       )
     ),
     'fields' => array(
       'name' => array('name' => t('Product: Name'),  
                       'sortable' => TRUE),
     ),
   );

 return $tables;
}