Access Umbraco database from non-Umbraco ASP.NET MVC site

Question

I maintain a complicated ASP.NET MVC web site. I want to add the ability to show bits of help text. The help text needs to be entered and maintained by non-developer content writers.

My plan is to install Umbraco on one of our servers, and give the content writers logins so they can enter and maintain the help items (each help item is a document).

Then when the MVC site gets a request for a specific bit of help text, I want it to retrieve the coresponding document directly from the Umbraco database, without going through the Umbraco site.

I am completely new to Umbraco. Is there a dll or NuGet package that I can install in my MVC site that allows it to retrieve a document from the Umbraco database?

Tim · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-17 10:46:34Z

2

You don't really want to talk to the Umbraco database directly. Umbraco turns the database content into a very fast cached version of the content that can be used to render the pages.

If you just try and grab the content from the database, you lose all of the speed bonuses. If this was me, I'd either create an Umbraco Web API controller on the site (as Mark suggested above), that you can call to get the help back, or create templates for the help pages that you could call with AJAX to get the HTML.

You could of course turn this on it's head. Umbraco has events you can hook into, so if you don't want your other site to talk to the Umbraco site directly, you could hook into the publishing events and push the help content back to your other site in some fashion (you could put it into you main site DB for example).

answered May 17, 2017 at 10:46

Tim

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Mark · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-17 11:03:18Z

2

You can do this in different ways.

I probably would go with implementing a webapicontroller for Umbraco that return the content in a async manner.

Another way that could work is installing Umbraco.Core as a nuget dependency on the MVC project and use UmbracoHelper to retrieve the content from Umbraco. I never tried this approach before so I don't know for sure if this will work.

edited May 17, 2017 at 11:03

answered May 16, 2017 at 15:29

Mark

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