views.md

Views

Building Views

The following are guidelines for building new views.

• Caching
  • For all public facing views, always use some form of caching. A non time-based cache is preferable because it often permits the longest cache lifetimes, and invalidates caches only when necessary. Possible options are:
    • Views content cache
    • Views argument cache
    • Time based
• Pagination
  • Always specify either a fixed number of results or a pager. Never display all results.
  • Whenever possible, use Views lite pager rather than a full pager.
    • Note that this is unfortunately mutually exclusive with caching due to bugs in Views Lite Pager. @see https://www.drupal.org/node/2285591.
• Advanced
  • Always add a semantically descriptive machine name to views displays. E.g ., use press_releases_all rather than page_1. This makes all PHP, CSS, and JS related to the view display more readable.
• Relationships
  • Whenever possible, use "require this relationship" for all views relationships. This causes views to perform an inner join rather than a left join, and is almost always faster.
  • Never use the Taxonomy Terms on Node relationship or filter. Instead, use a relationship or filter for the specific taxonomy reference field. This has a tremendous performance impact.
• Filters
  • For all exposed filters, manually set the fitler identifier to something end-user friendly. This should not contain drupalisms. E.g., use type rather than field_type.
• No Results Behavior
  • Always add "No Results behavior" of some type. This is typically text informing that user that no results were found.

@todos:

• When to ditch Views in favor of EFQ or straight queries. There's a reason Advanced Forum is slow on big sites.
• Proper views naming and tagging