Loading A User's Groups In Drupal 7

22nd May 2012 - 4 minutes read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and I will endeavour to correct.

Whilst working with Organic Groups today I had the need to load a list of the nodes that a user is connected to. After a bit of looking around in the source code I couldn't find a good solution on how to do this. So after looking around on Google for a bit I just sat down and wrote one.

Getting the group nodes that a user is a member of is quite easy as it turns out, but must be done in a number of steps. The first step is to grab a list of the group entity ID's that the user is connected through using the og_get_entity_groups() function. This can be used with no parameters (which assumes the current user).

// Load in the current user's group entity ID's
$groups = og_get_entity_groups();

Or you can load a user and pass this object to the function.

// Get the current user
global $user;
 
// Load in the current user's group entity ID's
$groups = og_get_entity_groups('user', $user);

The next step is to use these group entity ID's to load in the actual node entity ID's using the og_load_multiple() function.

// Load the entities object ID's
$groups = og_load_multiple($groups);

We can now finally start loading node objects using these group entities. This can be done in a number of different ways. The first is to loop through them and load in the node objects one at a time.

// Convert them into nodes, one a time.
$nodes = array();
foreach ($groups as $group) {
  $nodes[] = node_load($group->etid);
}

An alternative is to loop through the list of group entities and load all of the node entity ID's into an array. This can then be passed onto the entity_load() function.

// Load all of the nodes with one function call
$nodes = array();  
foreach ($groups as $group) {
  $nodes[] = $group->etid;
}
$nodes = entity_load('node', $nodes);

Using entity_load() is a good alternative as it means that you can use the conditions parameter to only load certain nodes without having to load each node in turn. In the following example I only load nodes of the type 'club' within the $nodes array.

// Load all of the nodes with one function call 
$nodes = array();  
foreach ($groups as $group) {
  $nodes[] = $group->etid;
}
$nodes = entity_load('node', $nodes, array('type' => 'club'), FALSE);

Update:

So it turns out that og_load_multiple() is no longer a part of Organic Groups, at least in the 2.x version. An alternative to this is to use node_load_multiple(), which will load all of the nodes as node objects. So, to load all of the nodes connected to a user in one go do the following:

global $user;
$groups = og_get_entity_groups('user', $user);
$groups = node_load_multiple($groups);

Be careful though, as if a user is a member of lots of groups this code will load all those objects.

entity

Drupal

Drupal 7

Add new comment

Related Content

Drupal 9: Setting Up Multilingual Content Views

Drupal Views is a powerful module. The ability to generate lists of things in Drupal means that it is used everywhere. It even has a powerful plugin system that allows other modules to interface with it and create more functionality.

Drupal 9: Customise Your Robots.txt File

A robots.txt file tells search engines spiders what pages or files they should or shouldn't request from your site. It is more of a way of preventing your site from being overloaded by requests rather than a secure mechanism to prevent access. It really shouldn't be used as a way of preventing access to your site, and the chances are that some search engine spiders will access the site anyway. If you do need to prevent access then think about using noindex directives within the page itself, or even password protecting the page.

Drupal 9: Get List Of Content Types

Getting a list of content types out of a Drupal 9 site is useful in a few situations. Mostly, I find that when creating a service of some kind that I will also create an administration form for that service to allow it to be restricted to certain content types. This list can be saved to configuration so that when the service is run it only effects certain content types, based on the saved configuration.

To get a an array containing a list of the content types on a Drupal site you can use the following code.

Drupal 9: Auto Tweeting From A Drupal Site When Content Is Published

Normally, when creating Tweets from Drupal 8 I use the Social Post Twitter module. This module is part of the Drupal Social Initiative and has been my go-to module when I've needed to read or send Tweets from a Drupal site. Since the release of Drupal 9, however, these modules have not been receiving the support needed and as of writing this article there is no easy way to install them on a Drupal 9 site.

Drupal 9: How To Tell If A Page Is First Published

I was writing some code on a Drupal site that detects if a page is being published and I realised that this state isn't as clear cut as you might expect. Drupal stores the published state of a page as the 'status', with 0 being unpublished and 1 being published. With revisions being turned on by default since Drupal 8 it is possible to see past states of the page when saving the page. The issue is that there is nothing in the current state of the page stating that this is the first time it is being published.

Drupal 9: Some Strategies For Developing Update Hooks

Drupal's update hook system is a powerful way of updating your site to introduce things that wouldn't be handled using the configuration system.

Modules will use update hooks to bring sites that have the old version of the module in line with the latest additions to the module. For example, if a new field is added to a table that the module uses then an update hook will be needed to add that field to all sites that are current using the old version. This update hook will be in addition to the install hook that would install the table with the added field in the first place.