Hey Elliott,

Have you looked into SurfaceControllers and the UmbracoAPIController? I believe from what I can see, you should be able to achieve this with a SurfaceController or UmbracoAPIController.

The UmbracoAPIController allows you to make easy request backs to the server through ajax to retrieve information from the database. The SurfaceController allows you to high jack page rendering for pages that call on that SurfaceController, This allows for custom code to be returned and used within the view.

Documentation for SurfaceContollers (there are some good videos on this in the umbraco video library as well): https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/reference/routing/surface-controllers

Documentation for the UmbracoAPIController: https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/reference/routing/webapi/

Here is some example code for a simple API controller function I coded a while back:

API Controller

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using Test_Json_WebApi.Models;
using Umbraco.Web.WebApi;
using Umbraco.Web.Mvc;

namespace Test_Json_WebApi.Controllers
{
    public class ForensicsApiController : UmbracoApiController
    {
        public JsonResult GetJsonString(Forensics viewModel)
        {
            var allVisits = Umbraco.TypedContent(5630).Children;
            List<Forensics> Logs = new List<Forensics>();
            foreach(var visits in allVisits) {
                Logs.Add(new Forensics                {
                    city = visits.GetProperty("city").Value.ToString(),
                    country = visits.GetProperty("country").Value.ToString(),
                    lat = visits.GetProperty("latitude").Value.ToString(),
                    lon = visits.GetProperty("longitude").Value.ToString(),
                    org = visits.GetProperty("organization").Value.ToString(),
                    query = visits.GetProperty("iPAddress").Value.ToString(),
                    zip = visits.GetProperty("postCode").Value.ToString(),
                    numVisits = visits.GetProperty("numberOfVisits").Value.ToString()
                });
            }
        }
    }
}

Model code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

namespace Test_Json_WebApi.Models
{
    public class Forensics
    {
        public string city { get; set; }
        public string country { get; set; }
        public string lat { get; set; }
        public string lon { get; set; }
        public string org { get; set; }
        public string query { get; set; }
        public string zip { get; set; }
        public string numVisits { get; set; }
    }
}

Angular Resource Request

angular.module("umbraco.resources").factory("gmapsResource", function ($http) {
    var myService = new Object;

        myService.getAll = function () {
            var test = $http.get("api/ForensicsApi/GetJsonString");
            return test;
        };
        return myService;
    });

This snippet of code grabs data from populated fields in the umbraco backend and stores it all in an angular control, this was used to display the content as pins on a google map and was part of a plugin for the umbraco backend.

If you are calling on the api for front end purposes then you can can make a call to:

umbraco/api/forensicsApi/GetJsonString

Hope that helps to give some inspirations, and will work with what you are trying to do.

Alright, when it was all said and done. I was able to achieve this by using the RenderMvcController and route hijacking.

The key things that were missing highlighted below.

For starters I followed this example: http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2014/1/27/a-practical-example-of-route-hijacking-in-umbraco.aspx

I made sure my parameters were null-able, used "RenderModel model" as the first required paramater and routed my request to the umbraco content/managed page adding the query string to the end of the url but ommiting the RenderModel as I believe Umbraco must handle that bit internally.

For example:

url: /services/character-selection?parmOne=something&parmTwo=somethingElse

In my view I had to reference the master template page, I am working out if it is possible to reference the template used in the route (otherwise that template.cshtml is just wasted)

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