Book Image

Visualforce Development Cookbook

By : Keir Bowden
Book Image

Visualforce Development Cookbook

By: Keir Bowden

Overview of this book

Visualforce, in conjunction with Apex, makes it easy to develop sophisticated, custom UIs for Force.com desktop and mobile apps without having to write thousands of lines of code and markup. The "Dynamic Binding" feature of Visualforce lets you develop generic Visualforce pages to display information related to the records without necessarily knowing which data fields to show. This is accomplished through a formula-like syntax, which makes it simple to manage even a complex hierarchy of records. "Visualforce Development Cookbook" provides solutions for a variety of challenges faced by Salesforce developers and demonstrates how easy it is to build rich, interactive pages using Visualforce. Whether you are looking to make a minor addition to the standard page functionality or override it completely, this book will provide you with the required help throughout. "Visualforce Development Cookbook" starts with explaining the simple utilities and builds up to advanced techniques for data visualization and reuse of functionality. This book contains recipes that cover various topics like creating multiple records from a single page, visualizing data as charts, using JavaScript to enhance client-side functionality, building a public website and making data available to a mobile device. "Visualforce Development Cookbook" provides lots of practical examples to enhance and extend the Salesforce user interface.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Visualforce Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Data-driven decimal places


Attributes passed to custom components from Visualforce pages can be used wherever the merge syntax is legal. The <apex:outputText /> standard component can be used to format numeric and date values, but the formatting is limited to literal values rather than merge fields. In this scenario, an attribute indicating the number of decimal places to display for a numeric value cannot be used directly in the <apex:outputText /> component.

In this recipe we will create a custom component that accepts attributes for a numeric value and the number of decimal places to display for the value. The decimal places attribute determines which optional component is rendered to ensure that the correct number of decimal places is displayed, and the component will also bracket negative values. A Visualforce page will also be created to demonstrate how the component can be used.

How to do it…

This recipe does not require any Apex controllers, so we can start with the custom...