Showing the number of results a search returns in Drupal 7
Ok ducklings, Drupal 7 can be a huge turd when it comes to some things. Today I came across one of those things.
The boss handed me a search result page design that included a “Showing x results” element. I bet you can guess that Drupal doesn’t do that with any available hook function or available variables/constants.
Searches in D7 can be themed from two files, search-results.tpl.php and search-result.tpl.php. The first themes the results of the second which themes individual search results. Handy!
Sadly, like I mentioned earlier, there’s no default function for what I want to do so I had to use a template_preprocess_search_results() function in my template.php file. Make sure if you’re going to copy my code that you replace the word “template” in that function with the machine name of your theme.
function yourtheme_preprocess_search_results(&$variables) {
$variables['search_results'] = '';
if (!empty($variables['module'])) {
$variables['module'] = check_plain($variables['module']);
}
$search_count = array();
foreach ($variables['results'] as $result) {
$search_count[] = $result;
$variables['search_results'] .= theme('search_result', array('result' => $result, 'module' => $variables['module']));
}
$search_count = count($search_count);
$variables['count'] = $search_count;
$variables['pager'] = theme('pager', array('tags' => NULL));
$variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'search_results__' . $variables['module'];
}
This is pretty much the same as the standard version of the function except that I created an empty array, and then populated it with results in that foreach() function. Then I used PHP’s count() to see how many keys were in the array. That’s the number of results.
The last part, $variables[‘count’] is the special piece which makes it available in the search-results.tpl.php file. So in that file, I can just print $count anywhere and blamo, I have a display of the number of results of a search.
