I ran into a little problem today, I have a specific panel for all my products. This panel contains out of a 3 column layout.

One of those columns contains a list of all other products in the same category. (which is a view).

When I created the view, I added a contextual filter to only display products out of the category that was send. (Categories are nodes and linked by a node reference) (This is just to allow the client to easily add and remove categories so he doesn't have to use the build in taxonomy)

I noticed however that I can only use the node id of the category to filter.

The problem is that the Panel only sends the string to the View, so the filter doesn't work. Is there a way to get the node id of the linked category?