Visualforce Developer Guide

Introducing Visualforce
Tools for Visualforce Development
Getting a Quick Start with Visualforce
Customizing the Appearance and Output of Visualforce Pages
Standard Controllers
Standard List Controllers
Custom Controllers and Controller Extensions
Advanced Examples
Override Buttons, Links, and Tabs with Visualforce
Using Static Resources
Creating and Using Custom Components
Dynamic Visualforce Bindings
Dynamic Visualforce Components
Integrate Email with Visualforce
Visualforce Charting
Creating Maps with Visualforce
Render Flows with Visualforce
Templating with Visualforce
Developing Salesforce Apps with Visualforce
Adding Visualforce to a Salesforce AppExchange App
Using JavaScript in Visualforce Pages
Communicating Across the DOM with Lightning Message Service
Visualforce Best Practices
Best Practices for Improving Visualforce Performance
Investigate Performance Issues
Follow Visualforce Design Guidelines
Control Data Size
Cache Frequently Accessed Data
Lazy Load Page Components
Handle Multiple Concurrent Requests
Write Efficient Apex and SOQL
Write Efficient Getter Methods
Optimize Lists and Tables
Optimize the View State
Optimize HTML
Optimize CSS
Optimize JavaScript
Optimize Images
Prevent Fields from Dropping Off the Page
Use the immediate Attribute Carefully
Visualforce Performance Case Study
Best Practices for Accessing Component IDs
Best Practices for Static Resources
Best Practices for Controllers and Controller Extensions
Best Practices for Using Component Facets
Best Practices for Page Block Components
Best Practices for Rendering PDF Files
Best Practices for <apex:panelbar>
Documentation Typographical Conventions
Standard Visualforce Component Reference
Appendices
PDF

Note: This release is in preview. Features described here don’t become generally available until the latest general availability date that Salesforce announces for this release. Before then, and where features are noted as beta, pilot, or developer preview, we can’t guarantee general availability within any particular time frame or at all. Make your purchase decisions only on the basis of generally available products and features.

Follow Visualforce Design Guidelines

To optimize Visualforce page performance, design task-centric pages, use standard objects and declarative features, and flatten component hierarchies.

Design Task-Centric Pages

Design pages around specific tasks, with a logical workflow and clear navigation between tasks. Don’t overload pages with functionality and data. Visualforce pages with unbounded data or a large number of components, rows, and fields have poor usability and performance. They risk hitting governor limits for view state and heap size, and they can exceed the record retrieval limit and the page size limit. Push back on requests to include nonessential functionality and build prototypes to validate performance concerns.

Use Standard Features Wherever Possible

The programmatic features of Lightning Platform make it easy to customize functionality. But standard objects and declarative features—such as approval processes, flows, and workflow rules—are highly optimized already and don’t count against most governor limits. Standard features simplify data models and often reduce the number of Visualforce pages necessary for business processes.

Flatten Component Hierarchies

Flat component structures process faster than deep, hierarchical component structures. Limit the nesting of custom components to logically organize functionality, and use custom components only when that logic is intended for reuse or inclusion in another package. Vast hierarchies increase server-side management and processing time because Visualforce maintains context throughout the entire request. Each traversal of the component hierarchy consumes time and resources. Vast hierarchies also put pages at risk of hitting governor limits for heap size.