Hi Chris

There are a couple of ways to achieve the kind of scenario you are talking about within Umbraco, and it will depend a little on the nuances of the case and the information to be displayed as what the best route it is for you to go.

But I think one way might be to create a Cases DocumentType in Umbraco, with a Cases Template

This would be the page you list your search results on.

In Umbraco there is a technique called RouteHijacking that is based on a convention of a Custom MVC Controller matching the name of a DocumentType.

(https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/reference/routing/custom-controllers/)

So if you create a controller called CasesController that inherits from RenderController

You will be able to create an Index action that intercepts all requests into the /cases Url, and from here you could read any search criteria from the querystring, take those criteria, query your database, find matching cases, and create a Custom ViewModel that inherits from Umbraco's default ContentModel, but with a new property 'CaseSearchResults' being an IEnumerable fo your matching database Case entities.

Then your Umbraco Template/View can be updated to use your Custom ViewModel

And you can use this to write out the list of Cases that match the search criteria...

Now for your Search Form, you would need to handle it's 'post back' - and in Umbraco there is a special type of controller called a SurfaceController:

https://our.umbraco.com/Documentation/Reference/Routing/Surface-Controllers/

That you hook up your form to post to. The surface controller then validates the form post, and if all looks good redirects the user to your /cases page with the specific querystring parameters to trigger the search.

Finally, depending on how much data you have in your Case Study to display, you could create a new Document Type called CaseStudyInfo, and allow it to be created under your Cases page.

Here you would create one page called DisplayCaseStudyInfo, and create another RenderMvcController CaseStudyInfoController (following the convention) and this could read the case study unique Id, and retrieve further information for the Case from the database, enrich another new custom ViewModel, that then gets sent to the template fo rthe CaseStudyInfo page to display the additional info...

Now this would mean all your extra case information requests would have a similar Url eg /cases/displaycasestudyinfo?caseId=1234

There is a further technique, to create a Virtual Controller

https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/Reference/Routing/Custom-Routes/#custom-route-with-ivirtualpagecontroller

That allows you to map a route to a virtual controller that could pull the case information from the database and present it 'as if it were' in Umbraco, so you could have URLs more like /cases/my-special-case

if that were particularly important!

Anyway hope that's all food for thought!

regards

Marc

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