How to sucessfully link to another cms page in Umbraco

Question

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Umbraco. I've been working on an Umbraco project for a little while now and I have been unable to figure out how to solve my problem (one of many).

Scenario - I have a content managed page and on this page users can search for things (these things come from an entirely different database to Umbraco). This is fine, I've created a child action which loads the form for search and created the controller method which returns the results. However, each result I need to link to another content managed page (the same content managed page for each result) that takes an ID so I can inject some dynamic data into the content managed page.

Great, I've got a method for handling this request in my surface controller and I can create an Html.ActionLink for each result that when clicked hits my controller action with the id parameter.

Problem - When each link is clicked the url that gets hit is

http://localhost:5645/umbraco/surface/{controllername}/{actionname}/?id={id}

However this request is outside the Umbraco context, so when I try to return any page with the following controller code, I get the following error:

    [ActionName("ShowDetials")]
    public ActionResult GetProperty(int propertyId)
    {
        return View("~/Views/TestView.cshtml");
    }

Cannot render a macro when UmbracoContext.PageId is null.

So my initial thoughts were to have a separate controller which inherits from Umbraco.Web.Mvc.RenderMvcController and try to handle the request in there, but then this raises other issues like being unable to use @Html.ActionLink to link to a RenderMvcController, I also don't want to have two controllers to handle content from the same section.

The other issues I have is passing custom models to the view.

If anyone can help me, I would be eternally grateful.

David Turnbull David Turnbull · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-21T13:39:10

For any developer having this same issue the only way I have been able to solve it is by having two controllers. A surface controller to handle the initial rendering of the search form and page and to display the results of the search, then a separate rendermvccontroller to handle clicking on an individual result and displaying a 'details' page.

However, this in my opinion isn't great and I would still greatly appreciate it if anyone has another solution.

How to sucessfully link to another cms page in Umbraco

1 Answers