How to use an aliased content title for a Views contextual filter?

Question

I've set up a page view with a path of 'services/communication/%' the '%' being a contextual filter of 'Content: Title'.

The problem with this is that the url ends up looking something like 'services/communication/Best Practices'. In the contextual filter I have set the case to 'lower case' and checked the box to 'Transform spaces to dashes in URL', however, neither of these things are doing anything.

In most cases the link to some content works fine but if there is a dash in the content title (e.g. 'online-led reporting') the content won't display.

How can I use an aliased content title with the contextual filter?

Answer 1

How I attacked the spaces/punctuation issue ( http://drupal.org/node/786612 ) in Drupal 6 was by creating a url_safe_title text field and putting it in any content type that needed to be looked at, searched for, etc by it, and then having nodeapi() "fill it in for me" like this:

function MODULE_nodeapi(&$node, $op, $teaser = NULL, $page = NULL) {
  if (isset($node->field_url_safe_title) && $op == 'presave') {
      module_load_include('inc', 'pathauto');
      $node->field_url_safe_title[0]['value']=pathauto_cleanstring($node->title);
  }
}

You can get fancy and hide the field with permissions, css etc so your users don't see it when creating content. I use http://drupal.org/project/nodeformcols to hide it and hide it from $content on display, too.

So, what this does is change simple titles like Hello World into hello-world but also online-led reporting into online-led-reporting with the added/needed benefit of being able to get back to "online-led reporting" from it. It also helped out with stuff like Kukla, Fran and Ollie that turned into kulka-fran-ollie :)

So now in Views I use this field instead of the node title when I needed to grab things. Just have to be aware of uniqueness, but that's another story in of itself :)