Actionkit Project

Introduction

The view level integration project presents a way of integrating ActionApps views into Drupal.
This is done using a Drupal block type module which could be easily expanded to support Drupal nodes and pages.

Features of the aaview module

This module is based on the Drupal tutorial Creating modules

• Uses the activeforms module for convenient configuration inside drupal
• Configuration of actionapps installation path in the aaview.module
• Verification of the installation path
• View parameters in the the aaview block configuration
• No extra HTTP requests

Problems of the aaview module

• Most of the links need changing - especially if they point inside AA
• At the moment there is only support for one block per Drupal site

PHP Configuration

Using a shared setup - one central AA installation for everything, other sites using PHP running in safe mode - does not work. Turning off safe mode is not an option for security reasons.
So the best solution seems to be moving the AA installation into the web site.

The following example shows step by step how an ActionApps View can be incorporated as a block in Drupal using the aaview drupal module.

This example uses the news headlines from the GreenNet home page. This screenshot shows how it looks on GreenNet's homepage

The headlines are created with this ActionApps view. Note the name of the view (GN News listing - new) and its Id (682).

Next comes the Drupal configuration. After enabling the aaview module and changing the access rules aaview shows up in the administer section in Drupal. It requires a correct setting of the AA_BASE_PATH. This can be found in the ActionApps configuration file (include/config.php3). After pressing Save configuration the module will check whether it is the correct path.

After successfully configuring the aaview module it will now be available in administer blocks as ActionApps View. Here it will show up in the right sidebar. The next step is to configure the ActionApps View by clicking on configure.

In Home | administer | block under Block specific settings it gives a list of slices. After selecting the GN news headlines the list of views gets updated. After selecting 682 - GN News listing - new the view shows up correctly in the right sidebar of the Drupal site.

Finally, the view from ActionApps is displayed in right hand side block on in Drupal using the aaview module.

Conclusion

It is possible to include AA views inside Drupal blocks. The current implementation offers a user-friendly interface. But the quality of this depends on the way the AA view links to articles etc. It will need some more development to make this work in a way that it helps with migration. At the moment it requires rewriting or customising ActionApps views and then still leaves the problem of where to link to for a fulltext view.
This could be improved by extending the aaview module to offer its own node and page type in Drupal.
Another solution could be to integrate this with the node type developed in task #3 - Data Level Integration.

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