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

Adding a header menu to a template


A common requirement for a website is to display a navigation menu as part of the header. In the scenario where each page defines its own header and footer, it is straightforward to highlight a menu option to indicate the page that is currently being displayed. When a template provides the header and footer information, a mechanism is required to allow the page to identify itself to the template, which can then highlight the appropriate menu option.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce template that provides header and footer content to four other Visualforce pages: a Home page, an About page, a Contact page, and a Links page. We will then make these pages available publicly available via an unauthenticated Force.com site.

Getting ready

This recipe requires that you have already completed the Creating a site recipe, as it relies on the custom domain and Force.com site created in that recipe.

How to do it…

  1. First, create the template; this is simply another...