Book Image

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Keir Bowden
Book Image

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Keir Bowden

Overview of this book

Visualforce is a framework that allows developers to build sophisticated, custom user interfaces that can be hosted natively on the Force.com platform. The Visualforce framework includes a tag-based markup language, similar to HTML that is used to write the Visualforce pages and a set of controllers that are used to write business logic to the Visualforce pages. Visualforce Development Cookbook provides solutions to 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 help you require throughout. You will start by learning about the simple utilities and will build up to more advanced techniques for data visualization and to reuse functionality. You will learn how to perform various tasks such as 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. With an interesting chapter on tackling common issues faced while developing Visualforce pages, the book provides lots of practical examples to enhance and extend your Salesforce user interface.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Adding error messages to field inputs


When users are editing or creating a record via a Visualforce page, they will often make mistakes or enter invalid data. The required fields will present an error message underneath the field itself, but validation rules or exceptions will simply send the user to a new page with a large error message, telling them that the insert or update failed.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page to allow a user to create or edit a contact record. The contact standard controller and a controller extension manage the page. The extension controller checks whether the e-mail address or phone number field has been populated. If either of the fields is populated, the record will be saved, but if both are missing, an error message will be added to both fields asking the user to populate at least one of them.

Getting ready

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

How to do it...

  1. First, create the...