Hi

I am a relative .Net/Umbraco noob, coming from Ruby on Rails land. I have what is probably a very simple problem to solve, but I'd like to solicit some of the community's advice before I go too far down any rabbit holes so to speak.

It's the age old contact form problem - I need to have a form with an email address, name and comment fields, and I want to fire these 3 fields off to Mailgun when the form is submitted.

Should I be using a SurfaceController for this? I just want to update the form with messaging when it completes the request, not redirect the user to a new page or anything. The form itself is plain old HTML right now, but we have a react.js layer so I would ideally prefer a JSON response from whatever this controller does.

My attempt to use a surface controller so far and testing it is running up against an error:

Cannot find the Umbraco route definition in the route values, the request must be made in the context of an Umbraco request

My controller code is as follows:

using Ecommerce.Web.Models;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using Umbraco.Web.Mvc;
using RestSharp;
using RestSharp.Authenticators;

namespace Ecommerce.Web.Controllers{

  public class ContactsController : SurfaceController
  {
    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Submit(ContactFormViewModel model) 
    {
  if (!ModelState.IsValid)
  return CurrentUmbracoPage();

RestClient client = new RestClient();
client.BaseUrl = new Uri("https://api.mailgun.net/v3");
client.Authenticator =
new HttpBasicAuthenticator("api",
"secret-keys-yo);
RestRequest request = new RestRequest();
request.AddParameter("domain", "somedomain", ParameterType.UrlSegment);
request.Resource = "{domain}/messages";
request.AddParameter("to", "[email protected]");
request.AddParameter("from", "[email protected]");
request.AddParameter("subject", "Website Inquiry");
request.AddParameter("text", "Test message");
request.Method = Method.POST;
var something = client.Execute(request);
  //parse form data here
  return RedirectToCurrentUmbracoPage();
    }
  }
}

I'm testing this endpoint by simply issuing a POST to http://localhost:25029/umbraco/surface/Contacts/Submit, which is where I see my 500 error showing up. To me that indicates that the routing is working as expected, but my knowledge of this ecosystem is insufficient to diagnose the underlying issue.

A final point of consideration: I am not persisting any of this information locally. For this reason I have only created a controller to do the work; dispatch the payload to mailgun. There is no model.

Just looking for tips and pointers here.

Thanks