Question

I’m so new to Umbraco it’s not even funny. I’ve built a few apps in house that are MVC3/razor so I’d prefer to use Umbraco 5. Plus the “Hive” sounds like what I’m looking for.

So, please forgive my ignorance.
What I hope to do eventually one day is after I’ve built out the majority of my site in Umbraco, basic static content pages. I’d like to integrate some how a page that users can enter search criteria and click submit, and it returns either multiple records, or a single detail page for the search performed.

The data is in another database, it is not possible to integrate into Umbraco. I’ve read up on Surface controllers and it sounds like it’s very possible to return data from another system to a template. But is it possible to filter the data just like a regular web application?

Answer 1

You can create your own areas and define routes and point those to customer controllers where you can query your database and do the stuff you’d like to do.

So you can entirely bypass Umbraco if that’s what you want..

Edit:

You could always add a querystring which will be passed to controller actions as parameters.

Let’s say: domain.com/allartists points to:

GetAllArtists()

Then you could call: domain.com/allartists?name=Jackson which would match:

GetAllArtists(string name)