Hello.

I'm building a search form for my Umbraco-powered site. I've been looking at this documentation: http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Mvc/forms/turorial-partial-views but i cant seem to get even that example to work.

This is how my setup looks (shortened to the relevant code ive added):

Search.cshtml, my template for the entire search-page:

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage
@{
    Layout = "Master.cshtml";
}

@Html.Partial("SearchForm")

SearchForm.cshtml, my search form partial view:

@model NameSpace.Models.SearchFormViewModel

<!-- Searchbox -->
        @using (Html.BeginUmbracoForm<NameSpace.Controllers.SearchFormController>("Search"))
        {
            @Html.TextBoxFor(x => Model.searchText)

            <input type="submit" />
        }

SearchFormController.cs, code behind where i want to perform my search later on.

public class SearchFormController : SurfaceController
    {
        [ChildActionOnly]
        public ActionResult SearchForm()
        {
            return PartialView(new SearchFormViewModel());
        }

        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult Search(SearchFormViewModel model)
        {
            model.searchText = "blurgh";
            return CurrentUmbracoPage();
        }
    }

And finally my modell, SearchFormViewModel.cs: 

public class SearchFormViewModel
    {
        public string searchText { get; set; }

        public IEnumerable<IContent> searchResults;
    }

With this setup i get the following exception:

An exception of type 'System.InvalidOperationException' occurred in System.Web.Mvc.dll but was not handled in user code

Additional information: The model item passed into the dictionary is of type 'Umbraco.Web.Models.RenderModel', but this dictionary requires a model item of type NameSpace.Models.SearchFormViewModel'.

Now, i can get past this by adding the following in my Search.cshtml instead of the above code:

@Html.Partial("SearchForm", new NameSpace.Models.SearchFormViewModel())

Which is not how they do it in the documentation, but i can live with that if no one else has a way around this?

Now to the real question:

I want to submit my search, perform a search in my controller and then return the model with the updated search results so i can redraw the form with all selected values (right now its only text, will be more) and also show the search results. 

One idea i got while writing this question (rubber ducking) was to use TempData, RedirectToCurrentUmbracoPage (should redirect to Search.cshtml right?) and then fill TempData with my model, use that model instead of passing a new one to my Partial View and then also use the SearchResults part for either direct output or by adding another partial?

Am i on the right track here or is there a completely different approach i should take? Im quite new to Umbraco, MVC, Razor, C# in general so my question might be aimed in the wrong direction.