Feature

With Views, we build structured components of our content that are placed on a page. HTML or formatters are applied at will, CSS classes are added as needed, and the component is most likely placed on a page somewhere and styled. And it’s gorgeous.

But you want more. You want that carefully crafted component to show up on that page with blazing speed, powered by the awesome Javascript flavor-of-the-year framework you’ve been using. You need that component in JSON. And you need it now.

Well, I have good news and better news. There are two ways to expose your Views as JSON (or XML, or other formats, but I’m going to focus on JSON in this article). One method allows you to retrieve your existing views through a REST server, and the other method lets you add a Services display in a View, which allows for finer-grained control of the JSON output. You may actually end up liking the second method better, even if you do have to add some new displays.

To start, let’s get some modules installed and a REST server up and running.

Huh? What Is A REST Server Again?

All you need to know here is that we’re going to allow someone (who knows, maybe you?) to access Views results as JSON data, by issuing a GET request. GET is the HTTP method that you can use with query strings in the URL. You know query strings, right? It starts with a question mark and then you string more than one query together with an ampersand, kinda like this: