Passing parameters between Visualforce pages

As the search page makes reference to the edit page, the edit page and associated custom controller must be created first:

Opening the following URL in your browser retrieves all accounts where the name field contains the string United :  https://<instance>/apex/SearchAndEdit?name=United.

Here, <instance> is the Salesforce instance specific to your organization, for example, na6.salesforce.com.

Notice that the page contains an Edit button, and clicking on this executes the following action method:

public PageReference edit() 
{ 
  PageReference pr=Page.EditFromSearch; 
  Integer idx=1; 
  for (Account acc : accounts) 
  { 
    pr.getParameters().put('account' + idx, acc.id); 
    idx++; 
  } 
     
  return pr; 
} 

This method initially creates a page reference for the edit page-EditFromSearch. It then iterates the accounts in the search results and adds an entry to the page reference parameters for the account ID. Each parameter has the name account, concatenated with the index of the result, starting from 1. This will result in a URL of the form https://<instance>/apex/EditFromSearch?account1=001i0000006OVLIAA4&account2=001i0000006OVLJAA4.

The EditFromSearch page then renders a form with an editable row per account:

The constructor of EditFromSearchController that manages the data for the page extracts the IDs from the URL and adds them to a list, starting with account1, until it hits a parameter index that is not present in the URL:

Integer idx=1; 
String accStr; 
do  
{ 
  accStr=ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters(). 
get('account' + idx); 
  if (accStr!=null) 
  { 
    ids.add(accStr); 
  } 
  idx++; 
} 
while (null!=accStr); 

The action method that saves the user's edits redirects them to the standard account tab once the save is complete:

return new PageReference('/001/o');