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  • Book Overview & Buying Visualforce Development Cookbook
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Visualforce Development Cookbook

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Keir Bowden
4.9 (8)
Buy this Book
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Visualforce Development Cookbook

Visualforce Development Cookbook

4.9 (8)
By: Keir Bowden
Buy this Book

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 (11 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Sections
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
Lock Free Chapter
1
1. General Utilities
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1. General Utilities
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Introduction
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Overriding standard buttons
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Data-driven styling
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Turning off an action poller
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Visualforce in the sidebar
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Passing parameters to action methods
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Reacting to URL parameters
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Passing parameters between Visualforce pages
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Opening a pop-up window
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Adding a launch page
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Testing a custom controller
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Testing a controller extension
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2. Custom Components
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2. Custom Components
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Introduction
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Passing attributes to components
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Updating attributes in component controllers
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Passing action methods to components
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Data-driven decimal places
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The custom iterator component
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Setting a value into a controller property
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Multiselecting related objects
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Notifying the containing page controller
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3. Capturing Data Using Forms
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3. Capturing Data Using Forms
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Introduction
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Editing a record in Visualforce
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Adding error messages to field inputs
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Adding error messages to non-field inputs
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Using field sets
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Adding a custom lookup to a form
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Adding a custom datepicker to a form
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Retrieving fields when a lookup is populated
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Breaking up forms with action regions
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The Please wait spinner
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Action chaining
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4. Managing Records
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4. Managing Records
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Introduction
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Styling fields as required
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Styling table columns as required
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Attaching an image to a record
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Managing attachments
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Maintaining custom settings
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Refreshing record details from embedded Visualforce
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Using wrapper classes
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Changing options based on the user input
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Changing page layout based on the user input
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Form-based searching
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5. Managing Multiple Records
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5. Managing Multiple Records
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Introduction
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Editing a record and its parent
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Managing a list of records
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Converting a lead
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Managing a hierarchy of records
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Inline editing a record from a list
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Creating a Visualforce report
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Displaying report data in Visualforce
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Loading records asynchronously
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6. Visualforce Charts
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6. Visualforce Charts
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Introduction
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Creating a bar chart
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Creating a line chart
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Customizing a chart
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Adding multiple series
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Creating a stacked bar chart
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Adding a third axis
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Embedding a chart in a record view page
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Multiple charts per page
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7. Enhancing the Client with JavaScript
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7. Enhancing the Client with JavaScript
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Introduction
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Using action functions
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Avoiding race conditions
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The confirmation dialog
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Pressing Enter to submit
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The onload handler
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Collapsible list elements
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Trapping navigation away
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Creating a record using JavaScript remoting
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8. Force.com Sites
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8. Force.com Sites
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Introduction
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Creating a site
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Record and field access
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Retrieving content from Salesforce
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Web to lead form
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Creating a website template
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Adding a header menu to a template
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Adding a sidebar to a template
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Conditional rendering in templates
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9. Visualforce in Salesforce1
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9. Visualforce in Salesforce1
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Introduction
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Navigating between pages
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Lightning forms
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Capturing the user's location
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Saving an image when creating a record
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Capturing a signature when creating a record
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Displaying a location in a map
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Scanning the QR code to access the record
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10. Troubleshooting
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10. Troubleshooting
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Introduction
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Avoiding validation errors with action regions
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Surfacing errors
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Multiple bindings to the same record
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Reducing view state size 1 - the transient keyword
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Reducing view state size 2 - HTML vs Visualforce components
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Debugging Visualforce
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Logging messages in a Visualforce page

Data-driven styling

A useful technique when creating a custom user interface with Visualforce is to conditionally style important pieces of information to draw the user's attention to them as soon as a page is rendered.

Most Visualforce developers are familiar with using merge fields to provide sObject field values to output tags, or to decide if a section of a page should be rendered. In the tag shown next, the merge field, {!account.Name}, will be replaced with the contents of the Name field from the account sObject:

<apex:outputField value="{!account.Name}"/>

The merge fields can also contain formula operators and be used to dynamically style data when it is displayed.

In this recipe, we will display a table of campaign records and style the campaign cost in green if it was within-budget, or red if it was over-budget.

How to do it...

  1. Navigate to the Visualforce setup page by clicking on Your Name|Setup|Develop|Visualforce Pages.
  2. Click on the New button.
  3. Enter ConditionalColour in the Label field.
  4. Accept the default ConditionalColour that is automatically generated for the Name field.
  5. Paste the contents of the ConditionalColour.page file from the code download into the Visualforce Markup area and click on the Save button.
  6. Navigate to the Visualforce setup page by clicking on Your Name|Setup|Develop|Visualforce Pages.
  7. Locate the entry for the ConditionalColour page and click on the Security link.
  8. On the resulting page, select which profiles should have access and click on the Save button.

How it works...

Opening the following URL in your browser displays the ConditionalColour page: https://<instance>/apex/ConditionalColour. Here, <instance> is the Salesforce instance specific to your organization, for example, na6.salesforce.com.

A list of campaigns is displayed, with the campaign cost rendered in red or green depending on whether it came in on- or over-budget:

How it works...

The page makes use of a standard list controller by defining the recordSetVar attribute on the <apex:page /> standard component:

<apex:page StandardController="Campaign" recordSetVar="Campaigns">

Note

Standard list controllers allow a Visualforce page to manage a collection of records without the need for Apex code. The collection of records, by default, is from the last list view accessed by the user. Specifying the filterId property in the page allows the records from a particular list view to be used.

For more information on standard list controllers, see: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.pages.meta/pages/pages_controller_sosc_about.htm.

Conditional styling is applied to the Actual Cost column by comparing the actual cost with the budgeted cost.

<apex:column style="color: 
   {!IF(AND(NOT(ISNULL(campaign.ActualCost)),  
   campaign.ActualCost<=campaign.BudgetedCost),  
  "lawngreen", "red")}" value="{!campaign.ActualCost}"/>

See also

  • The Data-driven decimal places recipe in Chapter 2, Custom Components shows how to format numeric values to a specified number of decimal places.
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