When Visualforce pages utilize a controller extension or custom controller, they can retrieve additional records via SOQL queries. This allows pages to manage more than one record, regardless of the record sObject
types or whether there is any relationship between the records.
Note
Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) allows information to be retrieved from the Salesforce database based on supplied criteria. It has an SQL-like syntax but does not support advanced operations such as wildcard field lists.
In this chapter, we will explore a number of scenarios to manage multiple records on a single page, ranging from a single record and its parent to a deep and wide hierarchy.
We will also see how Visualforce can be used to present details of a collection of records in response to user-specified criteria, in order to search for existing matches before creating a new record or to produce a custom report page.