Take Big Action With Views Bulk Operations

Recently I had to plan the unenviable task of adding terms from a new taxonomy category to dozens of nodes that had previously been created on a site. As I pondered my options (including a temporary Caribbean vacation) I remembered module I had seen pop up on Drupal.org called Views Bulk Operations or VBO for short. 

What VBO allows you to do create a view that will apply an action to many nodes at one time. So you must have the Views module installed and it helps to know your way around views a little bit because after installing and enabling VBO you'll need to create a Node view that will allow you to create a list of the nodes that you want to apply actions to.

The view that I created to make the taxonomy updates to the nodes in question had a pair of fields that allowed me to identify the nodes to update. Those fields for Title and Type, as in node type. This was just enough info to know for sure whether or not I wanted to make a change to the node. I added to the view a couple of exposed filters that would allow me to narrow down the list of the nodes by selecting the node type and a string of text from the title. The image below shows you what the finished product looks like.

So with this layout using exposed filters I can then make a couple of choices to filter the list down to the nodes I want to change. Then in the actions to take section I can indicate what I want to do by selecting the appropriate radio button. Then I can select one or more of the vocabularies in order to make that change. In my case I had added a whole new vocabulary with new terms so I chose Add the selected terms and then selected the vocabulary term that I wanted to apply (in this case from the Node Type vocabulary) before selecting the nodes (either one by one or by clicking the box next to Title to select all) then clicking the button (not shown in the image) at the bottom of the page to apply the update. At the end of the process you should see a confirmation that the nodes were updated. At that point you should double check a few of the nodes to make sure the updates were applied as you intended them.

Here's a little more about how I got to the end described above. The image below shows where you would select the style of Bulk Operations which is required for your view to offer you the correct options. Take note that the type of display you're looking for is one of Page. One more important thing to notice is the Access setting. Since this is the kind of function you would only want available to special users make sure you have Access set in a way that limits the ability to get to the page. In my case the user must have the permission to administer content types.

 

The image below shows the many options for the Bulk Operations style choice. Notice that I chose Modify node taxonomy terms as the only option. I don't know enough about the module yet to choose multiple options at once so I just stuck with the one.

The image below is what the preview looked like before I saved and attempted to use the view for the first time. Take note once again of the three elements. 

Exposed filters which allowed me to narrow down the list of nodesThe actions to take which should be consistent with my Bulk Operations settings choicesThe fields, Title and Type, which allow me to identify whether or not these are the correct nodes to take action on

Okay, so now you're ready to do some damage (in a good way of course) and make big changes to your nodes in a very short period of time. A final word of caution though. I did all of this on a pre-production site so if I did make a mistake it wouldn't affect site users. If you are trying VBO out for the first time I recommend doing so on a test site so that you can get the hang of what you need to do without having to back out major changes. Of course, if you make the wrong changes using VBO you can always back those changes out....using VBO.

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