how can I parse a subdomain as an argument in Views

auris has the right idea, but you can take it a step further and automate the creation of the aliases using the Rules module.

I recently had to do something very similar and it works great, though obviously it would be nice for Views and Subdomain to play nicely by default.

I've just bumped up against this same problem, so is it really wise to close this? Arguably we need this functionality in either Subdomain or views. We shouldn't have to set anything up with Rules, surely.

~%/foo ought to work. Views doesn't complain about the syntax (whereas it does complain about %/foo) and yet Drupal gives a 403 when I go to group.main-domain/foo .

@auris: we used a hook_nodeapi in the end to do more or less the same thing on group node update. It's risky, though: I ended up temporarily trashing the whole of the url_alias table! Modularized functionality would be safer.

Actually, I think this might be a more fundamental issue than Views or Subdomain can handle. Although Views does let you have a path of "~%/foo" , I think it should object just as it objects to "%/foo". Because if you create your own module and try to register a hook_menu item for a path beginning with either '%' or '~%' at the beginning of it, then it doesn't work. I think the first path element of Drupal's paths is important and has to be non-variable: something to do with menu handler/callback pattern matching.

Would be great to surface it, though, and work out whether it could be fixed for D7/D8. At the moment it's a bit of a gotcha with Subdomain.

My wish is that the following would work. The main thing is, it doesn't rely on PathAuto, but on views. This is because many nodes belong to multiple subdomains so can't be hard-coded via PathAuto.

dogs.domain.com --> dogs.domain.com/topics -- listing content where topic is a view that shows nodes with dogs, a taxonomy value selected in the view via an argument passed from the subdomain in the URL

cats.domain.com --> cats.domain.com/topics -- listing content where topics is the same view showing nodes with cats, another taxonomy value selected in the same view via the subdomain in the URL

Some nodes are not necessarily unique to ONE subdomain; they might appear in several, like this:

pets.domain.com --> pets.domain.com/topics -- where pets is all the content assigned taxonomy value pets, or eve better, selected by defining pets as dogs or cats or horses or birds or ...

And, to preserve the illusion of a topic-dedicated site, the subdomain should continue to work when opening nodes from the views

The idea is to treat each subdomain as a site devoted to whatever its topic is.

Currently, I do this differently and not so cleanly, via DNS redirection in my domain zone file (totally external to Drupal or my server):

dogs.domain.com --> www.domain.com/dogs --> www.domain.com/view1?topic=dogs
cats.domain.com --> www.domain.com/cats --> www.domain.com/view1?topic=cats
ETC
(above syntax not quite the real thing, used just to demonstrate basic redirection result)

Trouble is, the user never sees the topic subdomains, because by the time the redirect to views and nodes, the user it back at the main www.domain.com.

Lots of mainstream sites do what I'm seeking, and I can to it in my non-Drupal sites. Is there a way to do this in Drupal?

I don't know if any better ways have turned up in the last few months but I used rules as follows:

• Create a rule where the trigger is "After saving new content."
• Add a condition to limit the rule to a certain content type.
• Add as many actions as you like to create argument aliases where existing path is "node/[node:nid]/arg_value" and alias path is "[node:subdomain]/arg_alias."
• Use PHP to send arg(2) to your view's argument.

So, for example, I have a rule which goes:

Then in my view, I set up an argument where the "Action to take if argument is not present" is "Provide default argument" and my default argument is "PHP Code" containing simply return arg(2);

I used numbers for my argument values because my argument type is "Taxonomy: Term ID," so the alias subdomain.example.com/news would make the view grab content with a tid of 1. I presume you could use content type or anything else as an argument value when creating the aliases in your rule.

I also created similar rules to update the aliases when a group node is edited and delete the aliases when a group node is deleted.