Book Image

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Keir Bowden
Book Image

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Keir Bowden

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 (16 chapters)
Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Maintaining custom settings


Custom settings are a natural fit for data that controls application behavior. They are similar to custom sObjects but are cached, and so do not have to be retrieved from the Salesforce database each time they are accessed. For more information, refer to the Custom Settings Overview page in the Salesforce online help. Unlike custom sObjects, custom settings do not have a configurable user interface provided by the platform, which can make maintenance a challenge for inexperienced administrators.

In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce frontend to an existing custom setting that allows an administrator to take an application in and out of maintenance, with an associated message to display to users.

Getting ready

This recipe makes use of a custom setting, so this will need to be created and populated before the Visualforce page can be created:

  1. Navigate to the Custom Settings setup page by clicking on Your Name | Setup | Develop | Custom Settings.

  2. Click on the New...