The Visualforce framework allows developers to build highly customized, personalized, and branded user interfaces for their Salesforce, Force.com, and Salesforce1 applications. Hosted natively on the Salesforce platform, Visualforce gives developers complete control over all areas of the user interface, allowing them to satisfy complex business requirements and support multiple devices.
Visualforce pages use a mixture of HTML and Visualforce components, which are processed server-side and delivered to the browser as HTML. This allows the use of standard web technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, to provide an enriched and dynamic user experience.
The Visualforce Development Cookbook provides solutions for a variety of challenges faced by the Salesforce developers and demonstrates how easy it is to build rich interactive pages for both desktop and mobile devices using Visualforce. Each recipe contains clear, step-by-step instructions along with detailed explanations of the key areas of Visualforce, Apex or JavaScript code, that deliver the solution.
Whether you are looking to make a minor addition to the standard page functionality or override it completely, this book will provide you with practical examples that can be readily adapted to a number of scenarios.
Chapter 1 , General Utilities, covers enhancing or replacing standard functionality with Visualforce, systemizing business processes, guiding users through the creation and ongoing management of data, and writing effective tests.
Chapter 2, Custom Components, demonstrates how to create custom Visualforce components to encapsulate functionality for reuse across multiple pages and techniques to allow communication between component and page controllers.
Chapter 3, Capturing Data Using Forms, describes how to capture data entered in a Visualforce page and send this to the server for processing.
Chapter 4, Managing Records, offers techniques to streamline and enhance the management of Salesforce data using Visualforce pages, using styling to indicate required fields and changing pages in response to user actions.
Chapter 5, Managing Multiple Records, covers recipes to manage multiple records in a single page, ranging from editing parent and child records to managing a deep and wide hierarchy.
Chapter 6, Visualforce Charts, presents a series of recipes to create charts of increasing complexity, embed a chart into a standard Salesforce page, and add multiple charts to a single page in a similar style to a Salesforce dashboard.
Chapter 7, Enhancing the Client with JavaScript, shows how to use JavaScript to provide a variety of client-side enhancements, including confirmation of user actions, instant feedback on user inputs, and speeding up pages that access server-side data via remote methods.
Chapter 8, Force.com Sites, provides step-by-step instructions to configure a publicly accessible website styled with the Lightning Design System, allowing visitors to access the Salesforce records and extract boilerplate content to reusable templates.
Chapter 9, Visualforce in Salesforce1, demonstrates how Visualforce can be used to enhance the user experience on the Salesforce1 mobile device, including capturing the user’s location and attaching images when creating records.
Chapter 10, Troubleshooting, covers some common error scenarios and how to avoid them, along with tips to improve performance by reducing the size of the Visualforce viewstate and page load time in general.
In order to build the recipes from this book, you will need an Enterprise, Unlimited or Developer (recommended) Edition of Salesforce, and System Administrator access. You will also need a supported browser, such as the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari 8+, Internet Explorer 9+, or Microsoft Edge. Use the Setup menu to cut and paste the code samples rather than the developer console, as it may report visibility errors when the organization has a custom namespace.
This book is intended for intermediate Visualforce developers who are familiar with the basics of Visualforce and Apex development on the Salesforce platform. An understanding of the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is also useful for some more advanced recipes.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Once the payment reaches the state Complete the action poller will be disabled."
A block of code is set as follows:
<apex:column style="color:
{!IF(AND(NOT(ISNULL(campaign.ActualCost)),
campaign.ActualCost<=campaign.BudgetedCost),
"lawngreen", "red")}" value="{!campaign.ActualCost}"/>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the New button."
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