Menu from product characteristics in bitrix?

Question

PHP

Good day!
There is an online store on Bitrix.
An unusual task was received from the customer: on the site, instead of a menu with sections, to make a kind of filter menu. Those. a menu in which, instead of sections, product characteristics will be displayed (just like in a horizontal filter), when you hover over them, a drop-down list opens - the products of which particular characteristics we want to view.
For example: menu item "Gender". We point at it and it drops out: "boy", "girl". We click on "boy" - we are thrown on goods for boys.
Roughly speaking, this is just a filter, but it needs to work exactly like a menu, without unnecessary "show elements". And not to conflict with other filters.
I got to the bottom of the .left.menu_ext.php file, in which I see that the sections are transferred to the $aMenuLinksExt array:

if($arIBlock["ACTIVE"] == "Y")
    {
      $aMenuLinksExt = $APPLICATION->IncludeComponent("bitrix:menu.sections", "", array(
        "IS_SEF" => "Y",
        "SEF_BASE_URL" => "",
        "SECTION_PAGE_URL" => $arIBlock['SECTION_PAGE_URL'],
        "DETAIL_PAGE_URL" => $arIBlock['DETAIL_PAGE_URL'],
        "IBLOCK_TYPE" => $arIBlock['IBLOCK_TYPE_ID'],
        "IBLOCK_ID" => $arIBlock['ID'],
        "DEPTH_LEVEL" => "3",
        "CACHE_TYPE" => "N",
      ), false, Array('HIDE_ICONS' => 'Y'));
    }

I understand that you can somehow customize it yourself, but I still don’t understand how to put characteristics in this design instead of sections.
Tell me, what are the solutions?

Answer 1

just make the name of the buttons as you want gender - male, and in the link you will make a link using the filter gender m or f