Adding a launch page

This recipe requires a second user login. Ensure that this is not created with the System Administrator profile, as that profile has access to all Visualforce pages regardless of the security settings:

Log in using your second user credentials and open the following URL in your browser: https://<instance>/apex/Launch.

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

The resulting page displays a friendly error message announcing that your user does not have access to the page, and renders a clickable link to request access.

The Launch page declaration contains an action attribute:

<apex:page controller="LaunchController" action="{!allowAccess}"> 

This invokes the allowAccess action method in the controller before the page is rendered:

public PageReference allowAccess() 
{ 
   PageReference pr=Page.ProtectedContent; 
   try 
   { 
       pr.getContent(); 
         } 
   catch (Exception e) 
   { 
       pr=null; 
   } 
         
   return pr; 
} 

The allowAccess method attempts to retrieve the contents of the protected page programmatically. If the contents are retrieved successfully, it returns the page reference for the Protected page, which redirects the user to that page. If an exception occurs, the method returns null, which leaves the user on the Launch page and displays the friendly error message.