The Visualforce framework allows developers to build highly customized, personalized, and branded user interfaces for their Salesforce and Force.com applications. Hosted natively on the Force.com 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.
Visualforce Development Cookbook provides solutions for a variety of challenges faced by Salesforce developers, and demonstrates how easy it is to build rich, interactive pages using Visualforce. Each recipe contains clear, step-by-step instructions along with detailed explanations of the key areas of Visualforce and Apex 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 re-use 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, from editing parent and child records through 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, 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 animation of content to create tickers and carousels.
Chapter 8, Force.com Sites, provides step-by-step instructions to configure a publicly accessible website, allowing visitors to access Salesforce records and extracting boilerplate content out to re-usable templates.
Chapter 9, jQuery Mobile, demonstrates how to use Visualforce in conjunction with the jQuery Mobile framework to produce mobile pages to interact with data stored in Salesforce.
In order to build the recipes in 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—the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari 5 or 6, or Internet Explorer 9 or 10.
This book is intended for intermediate Visualforce developers, who are familiar with the basics of Force.com, Visualforce, and Apex development. An understanding of the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is also useful for some of the more advanced recipes.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text 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: "The list of available status field values for the converted lead is created by extracting all values from the LeadStatus database table."
A block of code is set as follows:
public void uploadImage()
{
att.parentId = parentId;
att.Name='image';
insertatt;
att=new Attachment();
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Navigate to the Apex Classes setup page by clicking on Your Name | Setup | Develop | Apex Classes."
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