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

Collapsible list elements


When a number of records and related information are rendered as a list, a user is often presented with a large amount of data that they must scroll through in order to access the items that they are interested in. One way to improve this is to allow items to be collapsed, showing enough headline information to allow the item to be identified, but taking up the minimum amount of screen real estate.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page that displays a list of account records and their associated contact records. Each account record is collapsed when the page is initially rendered, and the user may click a record to expand it and see the associated contact information.

Note

Visualforce provides collapsible behavior for the standard <apex:pageBlockSection /> component. However, this forces the content to be expanded or collapsed to be nested inside this component, which styles the content in a similar fashion to a standard Salesforce section. The solution...