Drupal Views Group by Field with Counts and Links - A Better Way

Alas, I came across a better way to take a bunch of rows from views, group them by a particular field, and provide a count for each.

Here is a basic example for Drupal 6 (probably very similar for Drupal 7).

Basic Settings

Style: HTML List

Fields

Node id (exclude from display)

Node title

Arguments

Node title

Action to take if argument is not present: Summary, sorted ascending

Style: Unformatted

Settings: Display record count with link

Conclusion

The trick here is setting up the argument to match that of the field, then choosing to use a 'Summary, sorted ascending' for the 'Action to take if argument is not present', then adjusting the settings for the argument so it will 'Display record count with link'.

This technique will provide a grouped list with counts and a link. However, for my case (and in the past) the link always comes out as a link to the base path, i.e. '/'. I have searched and searched to figure out how to set the path to use for the link in the 'Display record count with link' but I haven't found anything. So, we'll revert to good ol' tpl.php files.

Themeing the link

Grab a copy of the the template file in the views module (views/theme/views-view-summary-unformatted.tpl.php) and place it in your site's theme's directory (sites/all/themes/my_theme). Rename the file so it matches the file naming convention needed for views to discover your template, for example rename the file to: views-view-summary-unformatted--my-view.tpl.php

Flush the theme registry cache to have Drupal discover the new template file. Under your view's 'Basic Settings', 'Theme: Information', views will NOT discover your new template file, I'm not sure why it doesn't discover it. Additionally views doesn't even provide naming conventions for that type of template file, weird. But anyways, this will still work.

Now to actually set the path of the link to the way we want... just inside the 'foreach' loop inside your new template file, you can set the '$row->url' to whatever you'd like. For example:

$row->url = base_path() . "node/" . $row->nid;

Please use the Devel module to dsm or dpm the value of $row during each iteration. That way you can look to make sure you are accessing the correct variable name inside the $row variable.