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

Maintaining custom settings


Custom settings are a natural fit for data that controls application behavior. They are similar to custom sObjects but are cached, and so do not have to be retrieved from the Salesforce database each time they are accessed. For more information, refer to the Custom Settings Overview page in the Salesforce online help. Unlike custom sObjects, custom settings do not have a configurable user interface provided by the platform, which can make maintenance a challenge for inexperienced administrators.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce frontend to an existing custom setting that allows an administrator to take an application in and out of maintenance, with an associated message to display to users.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of a custom setting, so this will need to be created and populated before the Visualforce page can be created.

  1. Navigate to the Custom Settings setup page by clicking on Your Name | Setup | Develop | Custom Settings.

  2. Click on the New...