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

Attaching an image to a record


Associating an image with a record is a common requirement while implementing Salesforce, for example, adding a photo to a contact or a custom news story sObject. Using the standard attachments functionality creates a disconnect between the record and the image, requiring additional clicks to view the image, and often relies on the user following a naming convention when uploading the file.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page to allow a user to attach an image to a contact record. The page also displays the image if one has been uploaded. This page will be embedded into the standard contact page layout.

Note

While the size limit for a record attachment in Salesforce is 5 MB, as the attachment in this recipe is rendered on a Visualforce page, it is important to keep the size of the file as small as possible to avoid lengthy download times and excessive bandwidth usage.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of a controller extension, so this will need...