Drupal 7 Views Change the Query String

Question

I have a complex View that needs to utilize multiple contextual filters. Currently to access the filters I need to separate the values with a "/". I'm attempting to code a solution that passes arguments to a View (via URL) and it would be ideal to have the query string look like this:

http://www.example.com/query?nid=1450&tid=543

vs (the current way)

http://www.example.com/query/1450/543

so that I can better parse this. How can I get a View to accept parameters like this?

Answer 1

What you're actually saying is that you don't want contextual filters, contextual means that you want an argument based on the context of the site which is usually separated out by the url.

The quickest way to do what you want is this.

• move your contextual filters into the filters section of views, making sure that you expose them to visitors.
• Under the more setting of each filter is where you set the filter identifier and change the advanced options to label the filter as you require such as "nid" then your url would be mywebsite.com/page?nid=xxx
• Then under the exposed form settings, change the setting to "expose form as block" to yes to make the exposed filters disappear.

Answer 2

You need the module Views Contextual Filter Query.

From the module page:

Allows url query values to be used as contextual filter arguments. This module is an answer to the many stackoverflow topics where the solution is to fetch query parameters by using the default PHP argument filter in Views (yucks!).