Hi Dibs

There are different ways of making this work.

Generally the rule of thumb for Umbraco is to use a SurfaceController that has the job of handling a 'post back' from a form - and also for convenient ChildActions for rendering a PartialView inside your Umbraco template, eg to present the form.

However, you would typically use a RenderMvcController to handle the rendering of content for a request.

Therefore in this kind of pattern you often end up with two Controllers, one a SurfaceController that has a child action that Renders the form, and an Action that handles the postback from the form - checks validation etc

but if the form posting back validates then the SurfaceController would usually redirect to a GetRequest to a RenderMvcController that has the job of performing the search, and passing a custom model to the view to display the results.

So if your Search Results Page has Document Type 'SearchPage'

Create a controller called 'SearchPageController' that inherits from RenderMvcController

      public class SearchPageController : RenderMvcController
        {
            public ActionResult Index(ContentModel model, string searchTerm = "", int page = 1)
            {
                //create your custom view model
                SearchPageViewModel searchPageViewModel = new SearchPageViewModel(model.Content, model.CurrentCulture));
    //do the search
                searchPageViewModel.SearchResults = SiteSearchService.SearchSite(searchTerm, page);
     then return the custom model:
                return CurrentTemplate(searchPageViewModel);
            }
}

Then your view can inherit this custom model

@inherits UmbracoViewPage<SearchPageViewModel>

You can render your search form either directly from a partial:

<div>
@Html.Partial("SearchForm", new SiteSearchCriteria() { SearchTerm = Model.SearchResults.SearchTerm })
</div>

or via a child action @Html.Action("RenderSearchForm","SearchFormSurface")

and have a property on your custom model determining if there are search results

  @if (Model.SearchResults.HasSearchResults)
                {
  <ol class="list-group list-group__minimal">
                        @foreach (var searchResult in Model.SearchResults.Results)
                        {
                            <li class="list-group-item [email protected]()">
                                <a href="@searchResult.Url" class="h5">@searchResult.Title</a>
                                @if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(searchResult.Summary))
                                {
                                    <p>@searchResult.Summary</p>
                                }
                            </li>
                        }
                    </ol>

}

And then your SurfaceController could look something like this:

public class SearchController : SurfaceController
{
    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Search(SiteSearchCriteria searchCriteria)
    {
        if (!ModelState.IsValid)
        {
            return CurrentUmbracoPage();
        }
        else
        {
            var searchResultsPage = SiteService.GetSearchPage();
            return RedirectToUmbracoPage(searchResultsPage,"searchTerm=" + searchCriteria.SearchTerm);
        }
    }
}

so basically all it does is validate the posting of the form, and then redirect to the searchpage to enable the RenderMvcController to do the searching...

So I think you have most of the bits there, but not handling the request to the search page... but there are lots of different ways of doing this!

regards

Marc