Visualforce Overview in Salesforce

Visualforce is a powerful web development framework that lets Salesforce developers build sophisticated, custom user interfaces. If you’re working within the Salesforce ecosystem, understanding Visualforce is essential for extending the platform’s capabilities. In this blog, you’ll get a solid foundation in:

• The basics of Visualforce: What it is and how it fits into the Salesforce architecture.
• Key components: The roles of Visualforce markup and controllers.
• MVC pattern: How Visualforce separates concerns for organized development.
• Benefits of using Visualforce: Why it’s a valuable tool for customization.

Visualforce Overview

Visualforce is a web development framework for the Lightning platform that allows developers to create custom interface components for mobile and desktop apps. Visualforce can be used to create apps that adhere to the styling of Lightning Experience; it is similar to, and it includes a set of server-side “Standard controllers” that can be used to perform database operations such as query and save. To create a more animated and rich user experience, Visualforce may integrate with any mainstream web technology or JavaScript framework. Each page is accessible by a unique URL.

Visualforce page definitions are made up of two main components: Visualforce markup and Visualforce controller. Visualforce follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) development Pattern by separating the application’s view from the controller.

Visualforce markup

Visualforce markup is made up of Visualforce tags, HTML, JavaScript, or any other web-enabled code that is embedded within the <apex:page> tag. 

The markup specifies which user interface elements should be included

on the page and how they should be displayed.

Visualforce controller

A VisualForce controller is a set of instructions that describe what occurs when a user interacts with the components of a VisualForce page. 

There are two types of controllers on a Visualforce page: Custom Controller and Standard Controller.

Also Read: Controllers in Salesforce

Benefits of Visualforce

Visualforce has the following advantages as a markup language:

Concise syntax and Automatically upgradeable

• VF pages can implement the same functionality as s-controls but with roughly 90% fewer lines of code.
• When other components of the Lightning platform are upgraded, VF pages do not need to be redone. 
• The pages are automatically upgraded with the rest of the system because they are kept as metadata.

Model View Controller (MVC) style development

Visualforce follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) development pattern by separating the application’s view from the controller, which specifies how the app functions in the business logic, defined by a Visualforce controller written in Apex.

Integration with other Web-based Ul

Data-driven defaults designers can utilize visualforce tags alongside regular HTML, JavaScript, Flash, or any other code that can execute within an HTML page on the platform, including Lightning platform merge fields and expressions, because visualforce markup is ultimately transformed into HTML.

Data-driven Defaults

The platform renders visualforce components intelligently. Instead of constraining page designers to use different component tags for different types of editable fields (such as email addresses or calendar dates), they can use a single <apexcinputField> tag for all fields. For each field, the Visualforce renderer provides the proper edit interface.

User-friendly development

Developers can make changes to their visualforce markup in the same window that displays the final page. As a result, developers can instantly verify the outcome of an edit by simply saving their code. Auto-completion and syntax highlighting are also available in the Visualforce editor pane. Visualforce also includes “quick fixes,” which enable developers to create supporting components on the fly.

Conclusion 

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