Panels renders both primary and secondary tabs despite selecting only one of them

After further research it appears it may actually be a ctools issue based on how ctools renders tabs. I looked at page_tabs.inc (in ctools/plugins/content_types/page) and noticed this line of code:

$block->content = theme('menu_local_tasks');

This led me down a road of tracking down how ctools hijacks the 'menu_local_tasks' theme function in the "ctools_theme_menu_local_tasks" function in the file menu.inc (in ctools/includes).

I was able to put in some code to pass an extra parameter to the theme function based on the tab type the user selected but there are probably much better ways to go about doing this.

From the looks of it, it appears that selecting either "Primary", "Secondary", or "Primary & Secondary" from the panels settings for the tab type is not even being handled in the code.

I changed ctools_page_tabs_content_type_render function to:

function ctools_page_tabs_content_type_render($subtype, $conf, $panel_args) {
  $block = new stdClass();
  $block->content = theme('menu_local_tasks', $conf['type']);

  return $block;
}

And I changed the ctools_theme_menu_local_tasks function to:

function ctools_theme_menu_local_tasks($type = NULL) {
  $output = '';
  if (!isset($type) || $type == 'primary' || $type == 'both') {
    if ($primary = ctools_menu_primary_local_tasks()) {
      $output .= "<ul class=\"tabs primary\">\n". $primary ."</ul>\n";
    }
  }
  if (!isset($type) || $type == 'secondary' || $type == 'both') {
    if ($secondary = ctools_menu_secondary_local_tasks()) {
      $output .= "<ul class=\"tabs secondary\">\n". $secondary ."</ul>\n";
    }
  }
  return $output;
}

I am looking for a better and more correct way to do this as I have no idea how this will effect the other functionality of ctools, panels, or the core handling of menu tabs. I also have not extensively tested these changes, but they seemed to be working for at least my simple example from my first comment (assuming the theme is not garland since it's tabs are handled differently in the ctools code).

I would agree that normally the tabs are rendered outside the panel (by the theme), however we are using panels everywhere to take over the theme. We created a blank theme and we are using the default site template to render the primary tabs horizontally across the top and the secondary tabs in a left sidebar. My code changes work, but I threw it together very quickly and I am sure there is a more correct way to get this to work.

Thanks for the help.

Here is a patch for ctools 6.x-1.8 that at least temporarily fixes the problem if anyone else needs to render the primary and secondary tabs separately in a panel. This has been briefly tested and is working but the maintainer or other panels/ctools experts may have a better solution.

Since this is a patch to ctools, should this be moved over to the ctools issue queue?