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

Introduction


Visualforce charting allows custom charts to be embedded into any Visualforce page using standard components, only server-side code is required. A key difference from the standard charting functionality available in reports and dashboards is that the data is provided by the Visualforce page controller and can be derived from any number of sObjects, regardless of whether any relationships between the sObjects exist.

Note

Visualforce charts became Generally Available in the Winter '13 release of Salesforce. Prior to this, custom charts required use of a JavaScript framework, such as Dojo Charting or Google Charts.

In this chapter, we will create a number of Visualforce charts of increasing complexity, add a chart to a standard Salesforce record view page, and generate a number of charts on a single page, much like a standard Salesforce dashboard.