I guess one just needs to poke around the documentation - RTFM as they say. It would appear that SurfaceControllers are the way to achieve what I need. If anyone has any comments or additional information I would still be delighted to hear.

We pull external data to Umbraco at regular intervals using Umbraco's built in task scheduler: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/scheduled-tasks.

You're correct about using SurfaceControllers to accomplish this. We also used the Content Service in v6 (https://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2013/1/22/introducing-contentservice-aka-the-v6-api.aspx) to programatically add/update/remove documents so that our internal Umbraco data matched our external data.

In our case, we connected to a RESTFul web service, got our JSON data, and interated through that to see what matched our content in Umbraco. We performed our add/update/remove logic from there.

Here's a quick and dirty CSHTML web page that we created, which could easily be turned into a SurfaceController. These are kinda nice since they are easy to create and debug. However, it should probably be put into a controller so that we can create a unit test for it.

@using RETS.Models
@using RETS.Wrapper
@using Umbraco.Core.Models
@using Umbraco.Core.Services
@using umbraco.editorControls.SettingControls.Pickers
@{
    var searchRequest = new ResidentialListingSearch(); // Function to get search listings.

    var residentialListings = new List<ResidentialListing>();

    try
    {
        residentialListings = new SearchRequest().Search(searchRequest);
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {
    }

    int pagesCreated = 0;
    int pagesUpdated = 0;
    int pagesDeleted = 0;

    if (residentialListings.Count > 0)
    {
        var contentService = new ContentService();
        var homeDetailsSection = contentService.GetById(1293);
        var homeDetailsSectionChildren = contentService.GetChildren(homeDetailsSection.Id);

        foreach (var residentialListing in residentialListings)
        {
            var listingExists = false;

            foreach (var homeDetailsSectionChild in homeDetailsSectionChildren)
            {
                // Update Page
                if (residentialListing.MlsNumber.ToString() == homeDetailsSectionChild.Name)
                {
                    listingExists = true;
                    var page = UpdateContentValues(homeDetailsSectionChild, residentialListing);

                    contentService.SaveAndPublish(page);
                    pagesUpdated++;
                }
            }

            // Create Page
            if (!listingExists)
            {
                var newListingPage = contentService.CreateContent(residentialListing.MlsNumber.ToString(), homeDetailsSection, "HomeDetail", 0);
                newListingPage = UpdateContentValues(newListingPage, residentialListing);

                contentService.SaveAndPublish(newListingPage);
                pagesCreated++;
            }
        }

        // Delete Expired Pages
        foreach (var homeDetailsSectionChild in homeDetailsSectionChildren)
        {
            var listingExpired = true;

            foreach (var residentialListing in residentialListings)
            {
                if (residentialListing.MlsNumber.ToString() == homeDetailsSectionChild.Name)
                {
                    listingExpired = false;
                }
            }

            if (listingExpired)
            {
                contentService.Delete(homeDetailsSectionChild);
                pagesDeleted++;
            }
        }
    }
}

<p>Created: @pagesCreated</p>
<p>Updated: @pagesUpdated</p>
<p>Deleted: @pagesDeleted</p>

@functions
{
    private IContent UpdateContentValues(IContent page, ResidentialListing listing)
    {
        string address = string.Format("{0} {1}", listing.AddressNumber, listing.AddressStreet);

        page.SetValue("pageTitle", string.Format("{0} {1}, {2}", address, listing.City, listing.State));

        page.SetValue("streetAddress", address);
        page.SetValue("city", listing.City);
        page.SetValue("state", listing.State);
        page.SetValue("zipCode", listing.ZipCode);
        page.SetValue("community", listing.Subdivision);
        page.SetValue("price", string.Format("{0:C0}", listing.Subdivision));
        page.SetValue("description", listing.Remarks);
        page.SetValue("dateUpdated", string.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}", DateTime.Now));

        return page;
    }
}

Javier, thanks for your help - exactly what I was looking for. It is taking me a while to get used to the Umbraco way, but fundamentally I love the fact that you can do all the MVC goodness as well.

Glad I could help! Just an FYI, here's a site that I found a few weeks ago http://24days.in/umbraco/2013/. Its the "24 Days in Umbraco" blog for 2013. It has some great tips if you want to embrace the MVC goodness.

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