Hi Saba

The Surface Controller is for handling form posts within the Umbraco request pipeline (and also Child Actions for displaying a partial view).

When you handle a form post in a Surface Controller you are just validating the posted data via ModelState, and depending on the success of this you can either return

return CurrentUmbracoPage();

Which will take you back to the page you started on with the ModelState intact, eg showing any validation error messages or

return RedirectToCurrentUmbracoPage();

Which will return you back to the page you started on but with ModelState cleared.

It isn't designed to return data to the view that you might have retrieved from a database inside the Surface Controller action.

In theory, you could use the MVC ViewData dictionary to send data from the SurfaceController back to your template

ViewData["searchResults"] = mySearchResults;

but it isn't a nice pattern to work with...

What the Surface Controller is designed to do is validate the post request and then redirect to a url that will be responsible for returning the data based on your form post criteria.

If the alias of the document type of your search page is called 'searchPage', then you can create a new MVC controller called

SearchPageController : RenderMvcController

and override the Index action

public ActionResult Index(RenderModel model)
    {
   return CurrentTemplate(model);
}

see https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/reference/routing/custom-controllers for more info (this is called route hijacking in Umbraco)

Every GET request that comes in for your search page will be routed via this controller.

You can bind additional parameters eg

    public ActionResult Index(RenderModel model, string searchQuery, int someCategoryId)
        {
var viewModel = new MyCustomViewModel(model);
var searchResults = MyGetSearchResultsMethod(searchQuery, someCategoryId);
viewModel.SearchResults = searchResults;
       return CurrentTemplate(viewModel);
    }

If you create your own 'ViewModel' inheriting from 'RenderModel' then you can add your own properties, during the handling of the request, and send your enriched ViewModel to your View; adjusting the inherits statement to account for your new model

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<MyCustomViewModel>

@foreach (var searchResult in Model.SearchResults){
//you search results written out here
}

So your Surface Controller handles the POST of the search criteria, but you return a 'redirect' to your SearchPage, sending the posted values via the querystring eg: if your search form is on the same page as your search results return

 NameValueCollection queryString = new NameValueCollection();
            queryString["searchQuery"] = searchQuery;
            queryString["someCustomId"] = someCustomId;
            return RedirectToCurrentUmbracoPage(queryString);

or if the search form isn't always on the search page then there is another helper to take you to a specific page...

 var searchPage = Umbraco.TypedContent(searchPageId);
     NameValueCollection queryString = new NameValueCollection();
                queryString["searchQuery"] = searchQuery;
                queryString["someCustomId"] = someCustomId;
                return RedirectToUmbracoPage(searchPage,queryString);

And then your hijacked RenderMvcController will do the work of getting the search results, (based on the criteria the SurfaceController has redirected to it) builds a custom ViewModel, and sends it to your View to display.

Anyway hope that is enough to help you work out a way to make your search work!

regards

Marc