This is a guide to making pre-filtered directory links. The official Colbalt documentation can be found here.

Creating the url

In this example we will make a link that automatically show the Faculty from the Astronomy department. Here is what our final url will be.

Lets break this down into parts to better see what each piece does.

http://wdev2.cns.utexas.edu/directory/everyone
    ?option=com_cobalt
    &task=records.clean
    &ion_id=1
    &item_id=298
    &task=records.filter
    &ion_id=1
    &item_id=289
    &filter_name[0]=filter_cat
    &filter_val[0]=11
    &filter_name[1]=filter_k68066ab13794c412a4f4964d72492ee9
    &filter_val[1]=Faculty

Always include everything that isn't in bold. This is the base url that tells Cobalt we are going to make a filtered link. The parts in bold are our variables we want to sort by.

Creating a filter

After entering the base url we need to add filters to sort by. The first filter(filter[0]) will be the category. A filter always contains 2 parts, a filter type and filter value.

&filter_name[0]=filter_cat - This line tells Cobalt this filter type will be a category filter.
&filter_val[0]=11 - This line is the value of the category we want to sort by. In this case Astronomy is category 11. The category number can be found in the Cobalt backend.

Additional Filters

If we want to add more filters we can just keep extending the url and incrementing the filter number. (filter[1], filter[2], etc...) In this case we are already sorting by category Astronomy and we need to add the Faculty filter next. To do this we will use the field key value for the field Employee Type. The key value can be found in the cobalt backend.

&filter_name[1]=filter_k68066ab13794c412a4f4964d72492ee9 - This is the key value for the Employee Type field.
&filter_val[1]=Faculty - This is the value we want to filter by.

Final URL

Putting everything together in one line we get our final url...

http://wdev2.cns.utexas.edu/directory/everyone?option=com_cobalt&task=records.filter&ion_id=1&item_id=289&filter_name[0]=filter_cat&filter_val[0]=11&filter_name[1]=filter_k68066ab13794c412a4f4964d72492ee9&filter_val[1]=Faculty

To use this make a Joomla Menu item of 'External URL' and enter the url you've created.