Visualforce Development Cookbook

For developers who already know the basics of Visualforce, this book enables you to advance to the next level. With over 75 real-world examples accompanied by stacks of illustrations, it clarifies even the most complex concepts.

Overview

• Provide an enhanced user experience with dynamically generated, reactive pages
• Access data over additional channels via public web sites and mobile pages
• Packed with easy to follow recipes, including step-by-step instructions and Apex/Visualforce code downloads

In Detail

Visualforce, in conjunction with Apex, makes it easy to develop sophisticated, custom UIs for Force.com desktop and mobile apps without having to write thousands of lines of code and markup. The "Dynamic Binding" feature of Visualforce lets you develop generic Visualforce pages to display information related to the records without necessarily knowing which data fields to show. This is accomplished through a formula-like syntax, which makes it simple to manage even a complex hierarchy of records.

"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. 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 required help throughout.

"Visualforce Development Cookbook" starts with explaining the simple utilities and builds up to advanced techniques for data visualization and reuse of functionality. This book contains recipes that cover various topics like 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.

"Visualforce Development Cookbook" provides lots of practical examples to enhance and extend the Salesforce user interface.

What you will learn from this book

• Write effective controller tests
• Maintain multiple records from a single page
• Produce re-usable components for utility functions
• Create custom charts to visualize single or multiple sets of data
• Redraw part of a page in response to user input
• Replace standard components with custom, brandable versions
• Provide access to data via a public website
• Allow users to create and retrieve data from a mobile device

Approach

"Visualforce Development Cookbook" is written in such a way that even complex concepts are explained in an easy-to-understand manner. Following a Cookbook structure, the book covers some essential technical scenarios and includes over 75 recipes focusing on real-world development problems. This book is packed with illustrations and also contains lots of code samples for the better understanding of the reader.

Who this book is written for

"Visualforce Development Cookbook" is aimed at developers who have already grasped the basics of Visualforce. Awareness of the standard component library and the purpose of controllers is expected.

Keir Bowden

Keir Bowden is a 25-year veteran of the IT industry from the United Kingdom. After spending the early part of his career in the Defense 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 the 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 by Salesforce as a Force.com MVP for contribution and leadership in the community. In 2011, he became one of the selected few people worldwide to earn all Salesforce.com certifications, and now serves as a judge on the EMEA Technical Architect Certification Review Boards. Keir is also a prominent blogger on Apex and Visualforce solutions, and regular speaker at events such as Dreamforce and Cloudstock.

Keir is a Chief Technical Officer of BrightGen, a Salesforce.com Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner in the United Kingdom, where he is responsible for current and future technical strategy.

Keir worked as the technical reviewer for Salesforce CRM Admin Cookbook by Packt Publishing before accepting the challenge of authoring his first book.