Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Table of Contents

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Sections

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. General Utilities

Introduction

Overriding standard buttons

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Data-driven styling

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Turning off an action poller

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Visualforce in the sidebar

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Passing parameters to action methods

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Reacting to URL parameters

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Passing parameters between Visualforce pages

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Opening a pop-up window

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding a launch page

How to do it...

How it works...

Testing a custom controller

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Testing a controller extension

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

2. Custom Components

Introduction

Passing attributes to components

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Updating attributes in component controllers

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Passing action methods to components

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Data-driven decimal places

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

The custom iterator component

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Setting a value into a controller property

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Multiselecting related objects

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Notifying the containing page controller

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

3. Capturing Data Using Forms

Introduction

Editing a record in Visualforce

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding error messages to field inputs

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding error messages to non-field inputs

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Using field sets

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Adding a custom lookup to a form

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding a custom datepicker to a form

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Retrieving fields when a lookup is populated

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Breaking up forms with action regions

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

The Please wait spinner

How to do it...

How it works...

Action chaining

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

4. Managing Records

Introduction

Styling fields as required

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Styling table columns as required

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Attaching an image to a record

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Managing attachments

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

See also

Maintaining custom settings

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Refreshing record details from embedded Visualforce

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Using wrapper classes

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Changing options based on the user input

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Changing page layout based on the user input

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Form-based searching

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

5. Managing Multiple Records

Introduction

Editing a record and its parent

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Managing a list of records

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Converting a lead

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Managing a hierarchy of records

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Inline editing a record from a list

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a Visualforce report

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Displaying report data in Visualforce

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Loading records asynchronously

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

6. Visualforce Charts

Introduction

Creating a bar chart

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a line chart

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Customizing a chart

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Adding multiple series

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a stacked bar chart

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding a third axis

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Embedding a chart in a record view page

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Multiple charts per page

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

7. Enhancing the Client with JavaScript

Introduction

Using action functions

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Avoiding race conditions

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

The confirmation dialog

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Pressing Enter to submit

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

The onload handler

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Collapsible list elements

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Trapping navigation away

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a record using JavaScript remoting

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

8. Force.com Sites

Introduction

Creating a site

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Record and field access

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Retrieving content from Salesforce

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Web to lead form

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Creating a website template

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding a header menu to a template

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Adding a sidebar to a template

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Conditional rendering in templates

Getting ready...

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

9. Visualforce in Salesforce1

Introduction

Navigating between pages

How to do it...

How it works...

Lightning forms

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Capturing the user's location

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

Saving an image when creating a record

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Capturing a signature when creating a record

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Displaying a location in a map

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Scanning the QR code to access the record

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

10. Troubleshooting

Introduction

Avoiding validation errors with action regions

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Surfacing errors

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

See also

Multiple bindings to the same record

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more ...

Reducing view state size 1 - the transient keyword

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more ...

Reducing view state size 2 - HTML vs Visualforce components

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more ...

Debugging Visualforce

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more ...

Logging messages in a Visualforce page

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Visualforce Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First edition: September 2013

Second edition: August 2016

Production reference: 1260816

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78646-808-6

www.packtpub.com

Credits

About the Author

Keir Bowden is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry from the United Kingdom. After spending the early part of his career in the defence industry, he moved into investment banking systems, implementing systems for Banque Nationale de Paris, CitiGroup, and Deutsche Bank. In the late 1990s, Keir moved into Internet technologies, leading to a development of the order management and payment handling systems of one of the first European Internet shopping sites.

Keir started working with Force.com in late 2008 and has been recognized multiple times by Salesforce as an MVP for his contribution and leadership in the community. In 2012, he became the first certified technical architect outside of Salesforce in EMEA, and he has served as a judge on several EMEA Technical Architect Certification Review Boards. Keir is also a prominent blogger on Apex, Visualforce and Lightning Components solutions; and a regular speaker at events such as Dreamforce, Cloud World Forum, and Salesforce World Tour.

Keir is a chief technical officer of BrightGena—a Salesforce.com Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner in the United Kingdom, where he is responsible for the present and future technical strategies.

Keir acted as a technical reviewer for the CRM Admin Cookbook before accepting the challenge of authoring this book, which also happens to be his first.

I would like to thank my partner, Marie, for putting up with me spending even more time than usual on my laptop, something that neither of us had previously thought possible. I’d also like to thank my reviewers, whose tireless efforts and attention to detail ensure that the recipes are correct and perform as expected.

About the Reviewer

Rahul Sharma has been working on the Force.com platform since 2010 and is a certified advanced developer and administrator. Currently, he is working with Cognizant and has worked on most of the areas in Salesforce. He is an active contributor to the Salesforce developer community (he holds the Pro position) and Stack Exchange. He holds a bachelors degree in electronics engineering based out of Mumbai, India. His areas of interest are UI and mobile development, along with Salesforce. He can be reached at about.me/rahuls91221.

He was a technical reviewer for the following books:

Learning Force.com Application Development

Visualforce Developer’s Guide

Mastering Application Development with Force.com

I would like to thank my family & friends for support , and Packt Publishing for giving me another opportunity to review an excellent book by our Salesforce MVP Keir Bowden.

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Preface

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.

What this book covers

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.

What you need for this book

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.

Who this book is for

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.

Sections

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:

Getting ready

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.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

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:

   {!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.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of. To send us general feedback, simply e-mail feedback@packtpub.com, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

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Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

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Hover the mouse pointer on the SUPPORT tab at the top.

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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Visualforce-Development-Cookbook-2e. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Downloading the color images of this book

We