Passing Node ID to a Block with Views

Why use arguments?

Arguments are an excellent piece of functionality inside Drupal. They allow you to show results and extract information based on a particular variable. In Views, you may wish to only show a piece of information on a particular Node ID. You may have a CCK field belonging to a particular node that you wish to show, but only on individual nodes.

Quick Example

field_author is a fictional field. You may want to have a display that says "More from the author: *insert authors name here*".

So to do this you need to setup your view to show the field_author and have your filters set to Node type: Story and Node type: published (if your author field belongs to a Story node). If your author belongs to a page, use Page instead of Story and so on.

Now we add our arguments, add the argument for Node: NID. Use the following settings:

• Action to take if argument not present: Display all values
• Validator: Node (check your content type too)
• Argument type: Node ID

Test it out inside Views

Inside of the views module, enter a node ID of one of your storys/pages - you should see your field (author name) display in the results. In an ideal world, we could display this as a block and then just assign it to a region on the blocks page. But as a block will not take a Node ID as an argument, this will not work. To get this to work, use the following code inside your template file:

<?php print views_embed_view('view_name', 'default', $node->nid); ?>

In our example, our view name is show_author

<?php print views_embed_view('show_author', 'default', $node->nid); ?>

This is now outputting the view directly as your "default" display instead of a "block" - you can now embed this into your page.tpl.php file.