Salesforce has standard built in pages. For adding additional functionalities to the builtin standard page or to override the existing one, visual force pages can be created. They represent the programmatic aspect of the User interface we already discussed in MVC Architecture in Salesforce.
What is Visual force?
- A visual force page is a framework that allows developers to build sophisticated, custom user interfaces that can be hosted natively on the Salesforce platform.
- It includes powerful features to access, display and update the organization’s data.
- Visualforce pages/components are something we have to build on our own.
Creating Visual force Page
- Visual force page can be created from the Developer console.
- The Developer Console has automatic syntax highlighting, tag pair matching, auto-suggest and auto-complete, smart indenting, and many other features aimed at making it useful for editing markup and code. It’s the best built-in tool to use when you’re working on the same page for a while, or for Visualforce pages with custom controllers, longer, more complex code, and so on.
Elements of Visualforce
- Visualforce markup
- It uses a tag based markup language similar to html.
- Each component in the code is representation of different sections of the visual force page, a list view or an individual field.
- It is a flexible language and hence can be mixed up with HTML markup, CSS styles and JavaScript.
- The markup language is embedded within a single <apex:page> tag. The whole logic defining the user interface is written within the <apex:page> tag.
- Visualforce Controller
- A Visualforce controller is a set of instructions that specify what happens when a user interacts with the components specified in associated Visualforce markup, such as when a user clicks a button or link.
- Instructions that specify what happens when a user interacts with the components.
Components of Visual force
- Visualforce components are small, reusable pieces of functionality—think widgets, panels, user interface elements we use in Visualforce page markup.
- We can use either standard Visualforce components, or create our own custom components.
- To develop Visualforce pages, Salesforce provides a library of standard, pre-built components, such as <apex:relatedList> and <apex:dataTable>.
- A custom component encapsulates a common design pattern that can be reused in one or more Visualforce pages. It consists of:
- A set of Visualforce markup demarcated by the <apex:component> tag
- An optional component controller written in Apex that allows the component to perform additional logic, such as sorting items in a list, or calculating values.
To learn more about Visual force click Introducing Visualforce | Visualforce Developer Guide | Salesforce Developers
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