Visualforce
Get Started with Visualforce
- Create user experiences for any app, user, or device
- Develop and deploy entirely via the cloud
- Use standard HTML and web technologies
- Use a robust MVC development model
- Implement interface behaviors using Apex code
- Directly access the database, workflow and logic capabilities of force.com platform
At the front of any great business application is a great user interface; easy to use, powerful and suited exactly for the tasks, users and devices the application serves. Force.com’s Visualforce provides a complete framework for building and deploying any kind of user experience, and enabling any kind of interface design and interaction to be built and delivered entirely on demand.
These user interfaces can extend the standard force.com look and feel, or replace it with a completely unique style and set of sophisticated interactions, allowing the power of Platform-as-a-Service can be extended to virtually any requirement.
Overview of the Technology
Not familiar with Visualforce yet? Check out these resources for an overview:
- Whitepaper: Visualforce: Visualforce is a key component of Force.com, salesforce.com’s platform as a service (PaaS). Learn how companies and their developers can create any kind of user experience and deliver it entirely on demand, without software.
- Visualforce Technical Overview: This screencast presentation by Adam Gross explains Visualforce, and walks you through the basics of how you can use it to build powerful user experiences into your on-demand apps.
- Introducing Visualforce - Create Any User Interface as a Service: Get in-depth coverage provided by top Salesforce technical experts. Plus, learn how you can get into the Visualforce Developer Preview.
- Visualforce and Visualforce Components Demo: This 5-minute screencast shows the power of embedding default and custom Visualforce Components to create a dynamic user interface.
Technical Introductions
Ready to start coding? Check out the following tutorials and articles:
- Force.com Tutorial: An Introduction to Visualforce: This article provides a series of tutorials that contain enough material for you to get started building your own applications utilizing Visualforce.
- Using Browser Technologies in Visualforce - Part 1: Part 1 of 2 - Gives an overview of how standard browser technologies, including AJAX and Flex relate to Visuaforce pages.
- Force.com for ASP.NET Developers: This article provides a dive deep into using the Force.com Platform Web Services to access your Salesforce.com data from within a Visualforce page or from within a Microsoft ASP.NET Web form.
Reference Material
- Visualforce Developer's Guide: The official developer documentation provides an introduction and a great "quick start" tutorial.
- Spring '08 -- Download PDF || View Online
- Summer '08 Pre-release -- Download PDF || View Online
Code Samples
Here's a list of code samples to help you get started.
- Extended Print Preview - How to use Visualforce to create extended print previews
- Dynamic Edit Page - How to augments another component, giving it some Ajax behavior for the purpose of controlling the visibility of a section of the given Visualforce page dynamically as the user modifies values in a form.
Cookbook Code
The following code comes straight from the free Force.com cookbook.
- First Visualforce page
- Controller code for AJAX Visualforce page
- Visualforce page with AJAX code
- Visualforce page passing parameters to controller
- Basic Visualforce page accessing Salesforce data
- Basic Visualforce form page
- Controller code for basic table of data
- Page code for basic table of data
- Simple Visualforce custom controller
- Visualforce page for simple custom controller
- Second simple Visualforce custom controller
- Visualforce page for second simple custom controller
Cookbook Opportunity Wizard
Other Visualforce Code and Project Examples
- Creating custom tab for a single Record Type-An example using Visualforce page to replicate a home tab for a single account record type
- Creating a simple blog application-An example of using an Apex page to build a simple Blog app, uses YUI rich text widget
