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

Surfacing errors


When a form submission results in a rerender of a section rather than refreshing the entire Visualforce page, it is very easy to cause error messages from the controller to be swallowed rather than displayed to the user. In this situation, as far as the user is concerned, the form submission is broken; they click on a button and nothing on the page changes.

In this recipe we will create a Visualforce page to create an opportunity. When the user selects the account for the opportunity, the form will be submitted. The controller then retrieves the account record so that additional fields on the page may be populated. If the opportunity name is not defined, the form submission will fail and an error message will be displayed to the user.

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 controller extension for the Visualforce page by navigating to the Apex Classes setup page...