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

Errors – harmful if swallowed


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 account the opportunity is associated with is selected, the form will be submitted and the account record retrieved so that additional fields on the page may 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...