I have a Products node and under that I have Product nodes.

I have an Action method on a Surface controller that I post search values to and I pass those search values to a Partial view to render results. What I decided to do was add a Multiple Dropdown list with car makes, so when the content manager creates a new Product, they can associate the Product with different car makes.

Currently, I am doing all this logic in the view like so:

@model ProductFilterModel
@{
    Layout = "../Master.cshtml";
}

@{
    var products = Model.Content.Children.ToList();

    var filteredProducts = products.Where(x=>x.GetPropertyValue<string>("make").Contains(@Model.Make));
}

@foreach (var product in filteredProducts)
{
    <div style="border:1px solid black;">
    <h1>@product.Name</h1>
    <a href="@product.Url">The link to the @product.Name node</a>
    <h1 style="font-size:42px;">@product.GetPropertyValue("make")</h1>
        </div>
}

Is there a cleaner/better/preferred way of doing stuff like this?

Also, my products are stored in an external database. Would it be better to create a table on my external database side with the product id's that link to the templates and when the user searches, I can compare the id in the query results to the child node ids and only return those to be rendered. This way, I don't think I would have to have properties of make, model, engine, year.

Trying to see the advantages/disadvantages of both?