Hi all,

For the past six months I've been away from Umbraco doing AngularJS projects and now I find myself doing a rather large Umbraco (7) MVC project with a lot of forms manipulating data in a custom (non-Umbraco related) database.

I can't for the life of me remember how I go about doing forms in Umbraco MVC, though. At the moment I have all my views as strongly typed views with corresponding controllers which inherits from the RenderMvcConroller.

As far as I remember, you'll need to use SurfaceControllers to do postbacks w. forms etc, but I can't seem to grasp how it all fits together.

As an example, I have a view which should display a table with log items from the database. My view looks like this:

@model mynamespace.ViewModels.AdminLogViewModel

<div class="container">
    <div class="row">
        <div class="span1">
            @Html.Label("Søgekriterier:")
        </div>
        @Html.Action("RenderLogForm", "AdminLogSurface")
    </div>
    <div class="row">
        <div class="col-md-12">
            @if (Model.LogItems != null)
            {
                <table class="table">
                    <tr>
                        <th>Tid</th>
                        <th>Bruger</th>
                        <th>Besked</th>
                        <th>Niveau</th>
                    </tr>

                    @foreach (var logItem in Model.LogItems)
                    {
                        <tr>
                            <td>@logItem.Date.ToString("dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm:ss")</td>
                            <td>@logItem.Username</td>
                            <td>@logItem.Message</td>
                            <td>@logItem.Level</td>
                        </tr>
                    }
                </table>
            }
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

And my controller for this view looks like this:

public class AdminLogPageController : MasterController
    {
        private ILogRepository _logRepository;

        public AdminLogPageController(ILogRepository logRepository)
        {
            _logRepository = logRepository;
        }

        public ActionResult AdminLogPage()
        {
            return View(AdministrationMapper.MapAdminLogPage(CurrentPage, new AdminLogViewModel(), new LogRepository()));
        }
    }

(inheriting from the MasterController which looks like this)

public class MasterController : RenderMvcController
{
    protected ViewResult View(MasterViewModel model)
    {
        return View(null, model);
    }

    protected ViewResult View(string view, MasterViewModel model)
    {
        return base.View(view, MasterMapper.Map(CurrentPage, model, new UmbracoHelper(UmbracoContext.Current)));
    }
}

Now, the form needs to have several filter options, i.e. a searchfield, a log level dropdown filer etc.

In my AdminLogSurfaceConroller I have the following code:

public class AdminLogSurfaceController : SurfaceController
    {
        private ILogRepository _logRepository;

        public AdminLogSurfaceController(ILogRepository logRepository)
        {
            _logRepository = logRepository;
        }

        public ActionResult RenderLogForm(AdminLogViewModel viewModel)
        {
            return PartialView("LogForm", viewModel);
        }

        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult SearchLogs(AdminLogViewModel viewModel)
        {
            // This is where I'm stuck..
            viewModel.LogItems = _logRepository.FilterLogItems(viewModel.LogSearchViewModel.FilterDate,
                viewModel.LogSearchViewModel.FilterUserName, viewModel.LogSearchViewModel.FilterMessageText,
                viewModel.LogSearchViewModel.FilterLogLevel, 0, 200);

            return View("AdminLogPage", viewModel);
        }
    }

I have an odd feeling that this is fundamentally "wrong" when you have an MVC site with a lot of forms on it. I.e. I shouldn't make use of the controllers that inherits from the RenderMvcConroller class.

Question is, how would you make a table with a form to filter and search the records? I'm honestly a wee bit lost on this one ;-)

Thanks in advance!