Creating displays to interact with data using multiple Panels

Question

I'm wanting to use Panels to drive a whole bunch of pages for data interaction, but I'm not sure how to get Panels to "interact" with each other. I think the best way to put it is with an example. Say I have one Panel which has a list of nodes (in a view?), and another Panel that I want to display an editor for any node I click. And I have a page that has the first Panel in a block on the left, and the second in a block on the right. So I suppose on click, there'd be some AJAX grab that puts some page in the other Panel. Now, this is a simple example, and I'm going to end up with many different sets of interactions among multiple panels doing all sorts of stuff. But this works as a starting point. The goal is to be able to reuse these Panels in multiple pages that may interact with similar data, but with different operations (maybe there's the above edit page example and also a similarly designed view page also utilizing the left block node selector?).

How much of this can be accomplished with Panels (and maybe supplementary modules?)? Where would I need to code to put it all together? I assume it would need code perhaps in the Panel page that contains things like the data selector panel, data view panel, etc. to "link them together". Are there any good examples floating around on how to do this, since it seems like a fairly bread-and-butter exercise for any sort of web-based data interaction...

Answer 1

The best and probably the simplest way probably would be to do it with some coding but if you prefer using modules there a module families like Context or Rules that should give you some functionality which you are after. I also suggest looking into AJAXification methods and modules.