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

Using field sets


A field set defines a group of sObject fields. A Visualforce page can iterate the fields contained in the set and access the values and other information, such as label or type, through the merge syntax. This decouples maintenance of the page from the skill set required to author Visualforce pages, and allows administrators to add or remove fields through point and click.

In this recipe we will create two field sets for the contact sObject: one to display the address information and another to display information about the contact. We will then create a Visualforce page that uses these field sets to render input components inside a page block section, which allow a contact record to be created or edited.

Note

Field sets are in beta as of the Summer 13 release of Salesforce; this means that the functionality is of production quality but contains known limitations.

Getting ready

This recipe relies on two field sets, which must be created before the Visualforce page can be created...