In a previous post, we reflected on how our Drupal module Views Aggregator Plus came about: "….that [government] project was eventually put on ice, but during its course another module baby was born. We called it Views Aggregator Plus and set her free in Drupalland. It seemed a waste not to share it."

Views Aggregator Plus now enjoys thousands of installs across the world. There is a 90 second video about it on YouTube and quite a few mentions on Google etc. To us it’s lovely that our efforts didn’t go to waste, when its original raison d'être is no more.

The three real-live examples described in the previous post highlighted the module’s row aggregation capability. This is where Views result rows are grouped and compressed based on the identical values of one column, while at the same time applying aggregation functions (like sum, average, enumeration) on the other columns -- the project page explains this better with an example.
This type of data summary can provide useful insights on the entire dataset.

But Views Aggregator Plus does straightforward column aggregations easily too.

The following example was mentioned to us the other day. It can be found on Vizala.com, a new online database for economic, demographic, and market research information.

If you look at these examples ....

Industry output by countryAgricultural land by countryTotal international trade by countryImports by industry & country

.... you can see that the grey aggregation row (near the the top) provides totals and averages for any year that is selected.
Also, no matter what configuration of exposed filters is set by the user, VAP automatically updates the totals and averages for that group of countries.

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Image of aggregation taken from Wikipedia, "Pheromone"

File under: Planet Drupal