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

Changing page layout based on the user input


When a Visualforce form submission component specifies a rerender attribute, this causes a partial refresh of the page to take place, redrawing the specified components based on the result of the submission. This can be used to change the elements on the page based on the user input; for example, to guide the user through creating a record a few fields at a time.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page that allows the user to create an account record. If the user chooses an account type containing the word customer, additional fields will be rendered to capture additional customer-specific information.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of a controller extension, so this needs to be present before the Visualforce page can be created.

How to do it…

  1. First, create the custom controller for the Visualforce page by navigating to the Apex Classes setup page by clicking on Your Name | Setup | Develop | Apex Classes.

  2. Click on the New button.

  3. Paste...