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

Managing a hierarchy of records


Salesforce records often form part of a deep and wide hierarchy; for example, an account can contain a number of cases, each of which can have a number of comments associated with them. Creating and maintaining the elements of the hierarchy in isolation is a cumbersome and time-consuming task, as to add a comment a user must click through from the account record to the case record, and then click on the New button on the case comments related list to open the new comment page.

In this recipe we will create a Visualforce page that allows a user to maintain an account, its associated cases, and the comments associated with those cases. The user can update or delete existing records, or create new records at any level of the hierarchy.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of two wrapper classes which need to be created before the Visualforce page and controller.

  1. Navigate to the Apex Classes setup page by clicking on Your Name | Setup | Develop | Apex Classes.

  2. Click...