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Something that I find myself doing at fairly regular intervals is providing
selectlists on Visualforce pages to allow a user to choose from a list of
records. Sometimes its because I want to restrict the selection due to
complex rules, so a lookup isn't suitable, sometimes I'm not using an
inputfield to capture the id, but mostly its because I find it a lot faster to
select from a drop down list.
The downside to this is that if the record names are quite similar, it can be
difficult for users to pick the right one. When this is the case, I
usually provide a dynamically rendered preview of the record in the page so
that the user can check it is the correct record.
Here's a simple example of a dropdown - which of the 'Blog Account' entries is
the one I am interested in?
Adding a preview pane shows me the detail of the selected item:
as I actually wanted BrightGen, it is immediately apparent that I've chosen
the wrong record (I know the name makes that pretty clear too, but this is
only an example :). I can then choose the correct record and verify that
from the details:
The apex controller is very simple - it has a method to retrieve selectoptions
for 10 accounts and provides a property to store the user's selection:
public with sharing class DynamicDetail
{
public String chosenAccountId {get; set;}
public List<SelectOption> getAccounts()
{
List<SelectOption> accOptions=new List<SelectOption>();
accOptions.add(new SelectOption('Choose', 'Choose'));
for (Account acc : [select id, Name from Account limit 10])
{
accOptions.add(new SelectOption(acc.id, acc.Name));
}
return accOptions;
}
}
The page is also pretty simple - a pageblock to choose the account and an
actionsupport to rerender the preview panel when a selection is made. Note
that I've put the preview pane in the stop facet of an actionstatus. This
means that when the user chooses a different account, I don't have to worry
about clearing down theuser is entering information that will be presented in
a particular context. For example, entering markup into a rich text
field that will appear in a branded Force.com site - having a preview of the
content inside the branded page gives you an immediate indicator as to how
well the content integrates with the site look and feel.
By the way, if you are seeing odd line numbering on the code samples, this
appears to be a bug in chrome. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.
