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

The custom iterator component


The Visualforce standard component <apex:repeat /> iterates a collection of data and outputs the contained markup once for each element in the collection. In the scenario where this is being used to display a table of data, the markup for the table headings appears before the <apex:repeat /> component and is rendered regardless of whether the collection contains any records or not.

Custom iterator components may contain additional markup to be rendered outside the collection, for example, the headings markup in the scenario mentioned earlier. This allows the component to avoid rendering any markup if the collection is empty through the logic implemented in a custom controller.

In this recipe, we will create a custom component that takes a collection of data and renders a containing page block and a page block section for each element in the collection. If the collection is empty, no markup will be rendered. We will also create a containing page that...