Programmatically render Views with applied exposed form in Drupal 7

Create a view

Start off with a new Block View, I called mine myexampleview. I set up some filters, I want to only display published articles. Then I add an exposed filter for the category field that I call category_tid. Category is a term reference field I’ve created. I mark this filter as exposed and set it’s field name. The field name will be used later.

In the advanced tab I select that I will Use Ajax. This in important is this allows us to override the filter values. I will also set the view name to something good, articles_by_category.

The view is done and I will go back to the code. I will just render this view in my page.tpl.php template.

The code

We have our view ready on now we’re going to the rendering part. I set my own customized filter array calling the

$filter_fields = array('category_tid' => '5'); $custom_view = views_get_view('myexampleview'); $custom_view->set_exposed_input($filter_fields); $custom_view->render('articles_by_category')

You will also need to hide the exposed filter form for the form.

.view-id-myexampleview .view-filters { display: none; }

This all you need. Now you can modify this as you like and skip the regular exposed form.