Hi all,

I have been using Umbraco for some time as the main CMS of choice when developing new sites for our clients. As part of our development, we create travel sites for small to medium sized tour operators that link to the desktop software product we have written via web services. The aim of this is for the user to edit information about their products on their desktop without having to touch the website or CMS in any way as we use a combination of nightly calls to the web services of the desktop software and the Umbraco content service to present the information from the desktop product on the website with the correct formatting.

Currently, the update process is triggered by a scheduled task on the server which calls a url to trigger the update process:

/umbraco/webservices.aspx?type=product

This is also the way in which our clients can manually trigger updates to their website. However, this is reasonably insecure as ultimately anyone who has access to the website can trigger and update at any point. We would therefore like to port over our update process to a set of WebApi methods instead which will have a parameter passed along to them to identify that the user is allowed to run an update (or is the automatic process triggered by the server).

With regards to the WebApi method, I pretty much have this sorted but I am really struggling with regards to implementing a custom dashboard in the Umbraco back office that consists of a simple button that will trigger the update process, display a loading screen whilst the process is running and then finally display a popup notification when the process is complete.

I have attended the Umbraco Level 2 certification course last year and so far have been following the documentation I was given there but it doesn't really explain the process in any depth or detail so therefore I will need to some pointers or direction on how this can be done as the Umbraco documentation also isn't very clear on this sort of thing.

My controller is stored in my controllers folder and is as follows:

public class AxumController : UmbracoApiController
{
   private AxumController(){
       // setup global variables here
   } 

   public string GetAllGroupTours(){
      try{
          // web service calls and update logic go here
      }catch(Exception){
          Log.Error("Exception", ex);
          throw;
      }

      // Return a string with the number of updates that have been conducted
      return "" + webservice_tours.Count + " tours have been updated";
   } 
}

As I mentioned I am pretty happy with this however it is the Angular side of things that is a little confusing.

I have the following two files setup:

AxumSynchronisation.service.js

angular.module("umbraco.services").factory("AxumSynchronisationService", function ($http) {
    return {
        getAll: function () {
            return $http.get("/umbraco/api/Axum/GetAllGroupTours");
        }
    }
})

AxumSynchronisation.controller.js

angular.module("umbraco")
    .controller("Iceland_Mountain_Guides_Prototyping.AxumController",
    function ($scope, $http, AxumSynchronisationService) {
        AxumSynchronisationService.getAll().success(function (data) {
            $scope.result = data;
        });
    });

The question now is, how do i wire this up to my dashboard html so that it is initialised when a button is clicked and what is the best practice for triggering the built in Umbraco loading screen and notification bubbles?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as like I mention the documentation for this is somewhat lacking.