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

Retrieving fields when a lookup is populated


When viewing an sObject that has a lookup relationship to another sObject, additional fields from the related sObject can be displayed on the page using formula fields. When creating a new record, or editing an existing record and changing the lookup value, formula fields cannot be used, as the lookup field has only been populated with a record ID and the related record has not been retrieved.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page that allows a user to create a case sObject record. The case standard controller and a controller extension manage the new case record. When the lookup to the account that the case is related to is populated, additional fields are retrieved from the account record and displayed.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of a controller extension, so this will need to be present before the Visualforce page can be created.

How to do it…

  1. First, create the controller extension for the Visualforce page by navigating to the...