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

Creating a bar chart


Bar charts allow easy comparison of groups of data. A typical use in Salesforce is to view performance on a month-by-month basis; for example, to identify the effectiveness of a process improvement.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page containing a bar chart that displays the total value of won opportunities per month for the previous 12 months. This allows a sales manager to view at a glance whether sales are increasing or decreasing, and to identify any problem months that require further analysis.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of a custom controller, so this must be created before the Visualforce page.

How to do it…

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

  2. Click on the New button.

  3. Paste the contents of the BarChartController.cls Apex class from the code download into the Apex Class area.

  4. Click on the Save button.

  5. Next, create the Visualforce page by navigating to the Visualforce setup page by clicking...