Best Practices for Page Block Components

Adding More than Two Child Components to <apex:pageBlockSectionItem>

An <apex:pageBlockSectionItem> component can only have up to two child components. Sometimes, though, you want to add an extra child component. For example, you may want to add an asterisk before an <apex:outputLabel> and still display the associated input text field. You can do this by wrapping the asterisk and output label in an <apex:outputPanel> component, as follows:

For this page to display account data, the ID of a valid account record must be specified as a query parameter in the URL for the page. For example:

1https://Salesforce_instance/apex/myPage?id=001D000000IRosz

Note

1swfobject.registerObject("clippy.codeblock-1", "9");
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17<!-- Page: -->
18<apex:page standardController="Account">
19    <apex:form >
20        <apex:pageBlock title="My Content" mode="edit">
21            <apex:pageBlockSection title="My Content Section" columns="2">
22                <apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
23                    <apex:outputPanel>
24                        <apex:outputText>*</apex:outputText>
25                        <apex:outputLabel value="Account Name" for="account__name"/>
26                    </apex:outputPanel>
27                    <apex:inputText value="{!account.name}" id="account__name"/> 
28                </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
29            </apex:pageBlockSection>
30        </apex:pageBlock>
31    </apex:form>
32</apex:page>
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Visualforce Developer’s Guide

Best Practices for Page Block Components