Passing arguments from Panel to View without url or using contextual filter from panel to field of taxomony term within view

Question

Using Drupal 7, Panels 7.x-3.3, & Views 7.x-3.5.

I'm unsure the best way to approach what I'm trying to accomplish.

I have taxonomy vocabularies classifying people in my department. One example would be fellowships. Within fellowships there are terms 'Surgical Pathology', 'Transfusion Medicine', etc and within those terms there are terms such as 'Director', 'Faculty', Coordinator, etc with which people are associated. Each fellowship page will be a panel with various content and a view listing the people within that taxonomy.

We have numerous fellowships and would like to create a view that could be used for all via contextual filters or argument from the panel. The issue I'm running into is that I'm not going to use the full taxonomy term name in the url. For example 'Surgical Pathology' might be mysite/education/fellowships/surgical or 'Transfusion Medicine' might be mysite/education/fellowships/transmed. I can't use the full term name or term id as my hands are tied with keeping those urls.

I'm not sure if its possible to send an argument that is set in the panel (not from url) using 'Input on pane config' or 'From panel argument' in views but I haven't been able to figure it out or find any tutorials on how to.

The other method I tried was to add a field to the taxonomy called Manuel_Context which I put in 'transmed' or whatever the url argument actually is. So I have the Contextual Filter set in the view to '(Parent) Taxonomy term: Manuel_Context'. When I use the preview, the view works how I would like however I haven't been able to figure out the panel settings to get this to work. When I'm in the panel Settings>Arguments I can only select for the 'Context Assigned' Taxonomy Term: ID. I don't know how to get the panel to look for the field Manuel_Context of the Taxonomy Term.

Any suggestions on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

The easier (semi-automatic) way I can think of is to

1. Override the path /taxonomy/term/%taxonomy_term (enable the *term_view* page provided in system) in Page manager.
2. Build a page with panels for this path.
3. Now your content panes, when used in this page, can get their arguments with the 'From panel argument' option.

You can always have SEO-friendly URLs like mysite/education/fellowships/surgical or mysite/education/fellowships/transmed with path (in /admin/config/search/path/add).

The other way is to use the 'Input on pane config' option for your content panes. You will have to set the arguments for these panes manually in their settings dialogue. In your case, the argument should probably be the (numerical) term ID. This way your content panes don't need to be tied to a specific path pattern, and you can have some logical combinations in your contextual filters, such as 1+3+5 (term 1 OR 3 OR 5). This can get quite laborious, though.