[support] View with default argument does not display when using PHP

[Roy R]

Hello Drupal gurus,
Newbie drupal user trying to set up a website for a non-profit org.

I am using Content Profile to capture a Member Account Number field in
a CCK text field.
I have a Content Type for Contributions which basically lists each
contribution received, it has CCK fields for amount, check#, date, and
Member Account Number (shared field with Content Profile)

I want to add a menu option called "My Contributions" that will
display a table listing the contributions for the current user for a
given year (exposed filter on year) i.e. I need to get the Member
Number field, and use that to filter the Contributions nodes.

Reading various posts online I understood the best way to do this was
to use Views to retrieve the Member Account Number from Content
Profile and use that to create a default argument for another
Contributions table View. So I have a view called
"user_profile_select" that basically retrieves the user profile for
the current user. (1 record only), and a second view that takes two
parameters, a date, and a Member Number. The following code is added
to the default argument section of the Contributions table view.

$view = views_get_view('user_profile_select');
$view->execute();
if ( count($view->result) ) {
  $ret =
    $view->result[0]->node_users_node_data_field_membernumber_field_membernumber_value;
  return $ret;
}
else {
  return false;
}

This kind of works, I can see that the correct Member number is being
retrieved from the first view, and the second view's SQLs WHERE clause
shows the correct argument. But the View does not display any records
in Preview mode. If I pass in the same parameters manually, via the
Preview text box, it works.

What could be going wrong?? Thanks in advance for your help.

Also please let me know if there are any easier alternatives to doing
this? I tried playing with Panels and Contexts. My thought was I
should be able to put the first view (user_profile_select) in a Panel,
and add the second view to the same panel and have the second view
pull its arguments from the first view's context. But this apparently
does not work, I cannot see any CCK fields in the context.  I thought
this kind of simple header/detail displays might be supported out of
the box.

Regards
Roy