This is a general Umbraco architectural question, not a specific-to-the-line-of-code-question.
I am new to Umbraco but know my way around .net and asp.net mvc well.
For an upcoming project I am considering using Umbraco as a cms but as my experience with Umbraco is little, I cannot quite oversee what my options are when it comes to integrating an already existing mssql database.
The database that will support the Umbraco installation already has some tables present, containing product information. What is the best way to expose this data using the Umbraco api/models and subsequently integrate this data in Umbraco views?
E.g. can I create data models in the Umbraco admin and map those to the existing tables or is there another way that is considered to be a best practice?
Thank you.
I don't have a lot of first hand experience with this subject but I recently did an Umbraco bootcamp that covers exactly this, it's called "Umbraco Application Integration".
The course talks about Route Hijacking and contentfinders for mapping the external data into the umbraco request pipeline.
To call the external tables from you code, you can look into Umbraco's integrated lightweight orm called peta poco, but with a little work Entity Framework or nHibernate can also work.
To intergrate the external tables into you umbraco backend, there's a plugin called ui-o-matic that could help you out
Hopefully this puts you on the right track :)