Pros and cons of exposed filters versus contextual filters
Solutions
Nothing wrong with your approach. i have used it myself a couple of times and seemed to have worked pretty well.
regarding the situation you faced, contextual filters are more sort of an argument rather than a filter so the miss the comparison operators.
The tool in view to use external input to filter is the exposed filter. that is what it is designed for and I think you can go ahead with this approach.
Issue using Exposed filters along with contextual filters in views
I have a view page listing my stories/articles. I have a contextual filter based on the field Country which is a taxonomy term reference field. I have defined the path of the page as article-search/% to accommodate the contextual filter value. I have an exposed filter on the field article-category which is also of type taxonomy term reference. I us...
Grouping Exposed Filters (using Better Exposed Filters)
We have a view using Better Exposed Filters called Programs with an exposed filter on a taxonomy term "Level of Study". I'd like to group this so that the only values in the exposed filters are Graduate and Undergraduate. I first tried to "group" the terms as follows but then got errors as follows: I then tried to rearrange the taxonomy so that Gra...
Load view with ajax and contextual/exposed filters
I am trying to access content, that is provided via and can be filtered via a view. I want to load this content dynamically with Ajax. My problem now is, that I can access the view without problems using the following ajax-call: This works fine, but it ignores the value of filterName (Which corresponds to the according input in the view form). Unfo...
Exposed filters and contextual taxonomy description
A view called "Music". Fields: "title", "image" Exposed filter: "category" (is a taxonomy-field = rock, jazz, salsa,...). Every taxonomy-term has a description. When the visitor for example, selects "rock" the results are filtered. So far, so good. But i want also want that when a "category" is selected, the description of the selected term is disp...