Filtered by Visualforce

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Pass Values to New Opportunity Using Apex

Last year I wrote a post describing how to pass values to a new opportunity using the URL. This post is simply an alternative to accomplish the same goal of auto-populating values to a new record except using Visualforce and an Apex Class controller. For the purposes of our demonstration we will make some general assumptions about the values we want to pass to the new record. To keep it simple we plan on populating the Name, Stage and Close Date of the new opportunity. We will also make the logic flexible enough so that if Salesforce happens to pass additional information we will be able to include those key value pairs as well. [...]

Locale Aware DateTime Component

I am working with a client that is deploying some existing Visualforce pages to international Users. The Visualforce includes some Date and DateTime values so I checked them to make sure they would render appropriately for people accessing the logic internationally. It turns out that the original Visualforce code uses the <apex:outputText> tag to drive formatting for much of the Date/DateTime values within the pages. Therefore, I am converting the occurrences of each <apex:outputText> tag to the Visualforce component I built for rendering. [...]

Edit Link Override Visualforce Page

I just built a Visualforce application that people can use to associate a number of "child" records to a single "parent" record. Let's say that the application uses the Account object as the standard controller and then we extend the logic so that we can find, manipulate and link many Contact records. The functionality of the application is not important for this post but how we access the application is important. [...]

Custom Error Handling in Visualforce

I am a big fan of developing Visualforce pages that are useful to humans. This means providing helpful feedback to the person interacting with the application in order to limit User frustration. In some circumstances this means providing clearer error messaging rather than simply outputting any system generated errors. [...]

Error Handling in Visualforce with <apex:pageMessages>

A big part of building Visualforce pages is making sure that the human has a good experience while interacting with the page(s) you've designed. This means that you need to have a good way of handling errors when and if they occur. In this post I will highlight one of the simplest ways to handle an error by utilizing the apex:pageMessages tag within your Visualforce page. [...]

Salesforce Wrapper Class Example

A quick search for Salesforce wrapper results in the following definition. A wrapper or container class is a class, a data structure, or an abstract data type whose instances are collections of other objects. That's fine but if you're new to the concept then it is likely that the definition of a Salesforce wrapper class is not as useful as a practical example of the logic. [...]

Prevent Calendar Display When Page is Loaded

We've all seen those edit pages in Salesforce when you access the page and a date or date/time field calendar widget immediately pops up. Sometimes that's okay but sometimes we would like to prevent that from happening because we would prefer the focus to be on some other element of the page. As a Visualforce developer you can accomplish this with a very simple snippet of JavaScript. [...]

Contact Edit Visualforce Page

I was coaching a beginner developer recently and she had a simple question. "Why doesn't my Contact Edit Visualforce page look like the standard Contact Edit page?" She was trying to format the Salutation and First Name fields so that they were on a single line and in one column of a two column layout. The screenshot below illustrates the standard layout, which she was trying to mimic in her Visualforce page. [...]

Do not create a new opportunity upon Lead conversion using Apex and Visualforce

My client has a use case where they want to convert a Lead but not create an Opportunity at time of conversion. The standard Lead conversion page is fine with the business owners but they want the "Do not create a new opportunity upon conversion" checkbox selected when the page is accessed by the Users in their org. This will allow Users to create an Opportunity in certain cases but default the option to false otherwise. [...]

Salesforce Communities: Allow Partners to Delete

Salesforce releases Communities, which is a much needed improvement to the stoned-aged partner portal user interface. I took part in the pre-release and found that the new functionality comes with some positives and some negatives. One big negative that I found was the inability for Community Users to delete records. Salesforce.com provided a long list of reasons why partners should not be deleting records and why this basic functionality is not provided. But let's be serious... I am not going to field calls from partners because they need me or another admin in the org to remove records that they no longer need. After a week of taking these requests during the pilot, I decided to make the functionality available to Community Users - just because it would save me and those same partners some frustration. [...]

Wrapper Class Example for Visualforce Page

I must admit that when I first heard about using a wrapper class in a Visualforce page I did not really grasp the concept. Reading the developer docs and reading other blogs didn’t really help either. It was only when I came across a practical use case that the concept really sunk in and I thought I would share that here for any other developers trying to make sense of the idea. [...]

Avoid Heap Size Limits in Visualforce Pages

I built this great Visualforce page where I display and allow for editing of many records at once. The initial business requirement was for only a few hundred records to be used in this application but, as usual, requirements morphed and now the business wants to be able to use this app for thousands of records. So guess what... we now encounter the "System.LimitException: Apex heap size too large" governor limit. WTF! [...]

Yahoo! Modal Dialogs in Visualforce

I found this great post/tutorial (Modal Dialogs in Visualforce using the Yahoo! User Interface Library) regarding the use of the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library within Visualforce pages. But what if you work for a business that uses Internet Explorer (IE) as the standard / supported browser across the enterprise? You get the security warnings dialog when accessing the Visualforce page, of course. [...]

Visualforce Component for Locale Based DateTime Display

Sometimes, I really dislike Visualforce... Last week I spent a ton of time troubleshooting a display issue for a page that was built by another developer. The issue was that the DateTime field for an object was not displaying properly. It was showing the value in GMT and not the timezone of the user. After spending way too much time reviewing everything I decided to build a custom Visualforce component to eliminate the problem altogether. [...]

sObject Describe Result for Visualforce Picklist

More than a while ago, I wrote about populating query results to a picklist for use in a Visualforce page. That post receives a lot of traffic and I get some additional emails regarding that topic. So I thought I would put together another post similar to that one but with a bit of a twist. In the sample I will cover in this post I am going to show you how to use the methods for the Describe Result sObject in order to create picklists within Visualforce pages. [...]

Custom Picklist in Visualforce Page

Let's say that you're building a Visualforce page and you want to provide a picklist option for your users on the page. If the field where you want to store the selection is a picklist then you have no issue because the field definition will define that the page display a picklist when the Visualforce page is rendered. However, let's say that you want to display a picklist option based on a query from another object. How would you do that? [...]

Automated Exchange Rates in Salesforce.com

Reduce Repetitive Tasks, Eliminate Errors & Free Up Your Administrators.

Birthday Reminders for Salesforce.com

It might lead to a sale. Or it might make you feel good.