Surface Controller or Custom Controller in Umbraco 7?

Question

History

I'm a Web Forms developer with some .NET MVC experience, new to Umbraco and learning as I go.

So far I've been following the Umbraco documentation and videos to get set up which means all my controllers inherit from a "Controller Base" with common functions included, which in itself inherits from SurfaceController.

Recently however, I have noticed some bloggers and external reference material referencing RenderMvcController in the base class instead of SurfaceController - now the Umbraco documentation is unclear on the real differences between the two, nor which situations you should use them in.

The Question

Is there a clear and distinct difference between the imagined usage scenarios for a Surface Controller - inheriting from Umbraco.Web.Mvc.SurfaceController, and a Custom Controller - inheriting from Umbraco.Web.Mvc.RenderMvcController?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The documentation for the SurfaceController is here: http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Templating/Mvc/surface-controllers

In a nutshell, the SurfaceController is used for helping to interact with views. So for example you could post a form to a surface controller. Or you could write a child action to a view with a SurfaceController

RenderMvcController is used purely for routing to published pages. So you could sub-class RenderMvcController in order to 'hijack' requests to published pages of a specific Document Type. See here http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Templating/Mvc/custom-controllers.

Answer 2

To further clarify based on Digbyswift's answer:

SurfaceController = APIs or form targets (that then redirect)

RenderMvcController = custom logic to build a model or select a view for a content item (based on Document Type and, optionally, template)