Hi Saied,

What I think you are looking for is a way to map your products to virtual nodes within the CMS yeah?

I.E To be able to list pages for each product without having to create a page for each product in the back office?

If so, you should use an UmbracoVirtualNodeRouteHandler to create a custom route for your product pages. There's an excellent article on Shannon's blog about this functionality here but I'll also summarize it with an example of how I'd do it should the URL change.

If I'm way off bat here, sorry...

First you would set up a generic document type with matching template in the back office. Lets call it Product. A single page of this document type will be used to display each individual product virtually.

You then need to create an implementation of UmbracoVirtualNodeRouteHandler to tell Umbraco how to map the route to the page.

/// <summary>
/// The product virtual node route handler.
/// </summary>
public class ProductVirtualNodeRouteHandler : UmbracoVirtualNodeRouteHandler
{
    /// <summary>
    /// returns the <see cref="IPublishedContent"/> associated with the route.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="requestContext">
    /// The request context.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="umbracoContext">
    /// The umbraco context.
    /// </param>
    /// <returns>
    /// The <see cref="IPublishedContent"/>.
    /// </returns>
    protected override IPublishedContent FindContent(RequestContext requestContext, UmbracoContext umbracoContext)
    {
        UmbracoHelper helper = new UmbracoHelper(umbracoContext);
        string alias = "Product";
        return helper.TypedContentAtRoot()
            .First()
            .Descendants()
            .First(d => d.DocumentTypeAlias.InvariantEquals(alias));
    }
}

Also create a custom route you can do this via inheriting the ApplicationEventHandler class.

/// <summary>
/// The custom route handler for assigning custom routes.
/// </summary>
public class CustomRouteRegistration : ApplicationEventHandler
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Boot-up is completed, this allows you to perform any other boot-up logic required for the application.
    /// Resolution is frozen so now they can be used to resolve instances.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="umbracoApplication">The current <see cref="UmbracoApplicationBase"/></param>
    /// <param name="applicationContext">The Umbraco <see cref="ApplicationContext"/> for the current application.</param>
    protected override void ApplicationStarted(UmbracoApplicationBase umbracoApplication, ApplicationContext applicationContext)
    {
        RouteTable.Routes.MapUmbracoRoute(
        "ProductPage",
        "Products/Product/{id}/",
        new
        {
            controller = "Product",
            action = "GetProduct"
        },
        new ProductVirtualNodeRouteHandler());
    }
}

Now it's time to create a controller. In there you will grab the product from your external database and map it to your view model.

/// <summary>
/// The product page controller.
/// </summary>
public class ProductController : RenderMvcController
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Renders an individual product page.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="model">
    /// The <see cref="RenderModel"/> representing the current Umbraco node.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="id">
    /// The id of the product.
    /// </param>
    /// <returns>
    /// The <see cref="ActionResult"/> encapsulating the result of an action method that is used to 
    /// perform a framework-level operation on behalf of the action method.
    /// </returns>
    public ActionResult GetProduct(RenderModel model, int id)
    {
        // Do your logic here to pull the product from the external database and map it to your 
        // custom viewmodel

        return this.View("Product", viewmodel);
    }
}

Umbraco should now be able to find all the products by url. You will also now also be able to use Url.Action() to generate the correct url to your products since you have created a custom route.

Hope that helps

James

P.S I wrote this without the IDE so I dunno if it compiles. It should :)

Interesting...

Normally that umbracoContext parameter shouldn't be null. That method is ensuring that you have an UmbracoHelper available to query the published content cache for your node and I would much rather we figured out why the code I supplied doesn't work as it should than add the additional code. Did you set up the handlers exactly as I described? Can I see how your controller is coded?

To answer your questions though.

1. Yes. A node of that document type does have to exist in the back office. We need something to pin our virtual product nodes to.

2. I wouldn't remove the id from your path. There should be a primary key for your product data so that any lookups are fast. Adding the name as a slug though is a good idea. I would do it as an optional parameter though so your structure is something like mysite.com/products/{id}/{name} where the url would actually still route correctly without the name. There is an extension method to the string type in the Umbraco.Core namespace called ToUrlSegment() that you can use to clean up the name.

Your new route would be bound like:

    RouteTable.Routes.MapUmbracoRoute(
    "ProductPage",
    "Products/Product/{id}/{slug}",
    new
    {
        controller = "Product",
        action = "GetProduct",
        slug = UrlParameter.Optional
    },
    new ProductVirtualNodeRouteHandler()),
    new { id = @"(\d)+" }); // Add some validation for the Id.

3.The location of the classes shouldn't really matter as long as they are compiled within the solution and are referenced by namespace correctly. I'm assuming you are using a web application, not a site since you are able to place them in the route.

I would try to structure everything sensibly though and will place my classes in a separate class library project. You could organise yours under a folder called Infrastructure if you want to keep all the code together.

Sorry for the slow reply.

There's nothing I could see in your code that would indicate a problem.

Those lines intrigue me though. Have you tried cleaning and rebuilding the solution. When you build are any warnings shown?

The only thing I can think of that would cause an error like that would be calling the method on a separate thread from the request. It looks like you are not doing that though.

What version of Umbraco are you running?

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