Visualforce Developer Guide

Introducing Visualforce
Tools for Visualforce Development
Getting a Quick Start with Visualforce
Customizing the Appearance and Output of Visualforce Pages
Styling Visualforce Pages
Using Salesforce Styles
Extending Salesforce Styles with Stylesheets
Using Custom Styles
Suppressing the Salesforce User Interface and Styles
Defining Styles for a Component’s DOM ID
Using Styles from Salesforce Stylesheets
Identifying the Salesforce Style Your Users See
HTML Comments and IE Conditional Comments
HTML Tags Added or Modified by Visualforce
Using a Custom Doctype
Using a Custom ContentType
Setting Custom HTML Attributes on Visualforce Components
Offline Caching Using the HTML5 manifest Attribute
Render a Visualforce Page as a PDF File
Standard Controllers
Standard List Controllers
Custom Controllers and Controller Extensions
Advanced Examples
Overriding Buttons, Links, and Tabs with Visualforce
Using Static Resources
Creating and Using Custom Components
Dynamic Visualforce Bindings
Dynamic Visualforce Components
Integrating Email with Visualforce
Visualforce Charting
Creating Maps with Visualforce
Render Flows with Visualforce
Templating with Visualforce
Developing for Mobile Devices
Adding Visualforce to a Force.com AppExchange App
Using JavaScript in Visualforce Pages
Best Practices
Standard Component Reference
Appendices
Glossary
PDF

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Identifying the Salesforce Style Your Users See

When you’re creating a Visualforce page, it’s often useful to know the Salesforce look and feel your user expects, in order to render a page that matches their style. For example, some users have the choice to customize their look and feel. You’ll need to design your Visualforce pages to take these differences into consideration.

There are two global variables that can help you identify which style a user sees: $User.UITheme and $User.UIThemeDisplayed. The difference between the two variables is that $User.UITheme returns the look and feel the user is supposed to see, while $User.UIThemeDisplayed returns the look and feel the user actually sees. For example, a user may have the permissions to see the Salesforce Classic 2010 user interface theme look and feel, but if they are using a browser that doesn’t support that look and feel, for example, older versions of Internet Explorer, $User.UIThemeDisplayed returns a different value.

Both variables return one of the following values:
  • Theme1—Obsolete Salesforce theme
  • Theme2—Salesforce Classic 2005 user interface theme
  • Theme3—Salesforce Classic 2010 user interface theme
  • Theme4d—Modern “Lightning Experience” Salesforce theme
  • Theme4t—Salesforce1 mobile Salesforce theme
  • PortalDefault—Salesforce Customer Portal theme
  • Webstore—Salesforce AppExchange theme
Suppose a developer has hard coded some CSS styles to resemble Salesforce. In order to preserve the same look and feel on the Visualforce page for new styles, the developer needs to select between several stylesheets to handle the preferences of the user. The following example shows one possible way of accomplishing this:
Notice in this example that:
  • Using the rendered attribute you can “toggle” which sections display.
  • Since the <apex:stylesheet> tag doesn't have a rendered attribute, you’ll need to wrap it in a component that does.
Even if a new look and feel is enabled for your users, they may not be running the right browser or accessibility settings to see it. Here’s a code example that makes use of the $User.UITheme variable to present alternate information to the user:
Notice that although $User.UITheme equals Theme3, $User.UIThemeDisplayed doesn’t, and so the page won’t render to its full potential.