Visualforce Component to show Object Record Types

Happy New Year!

Time definitely flies and I wish you wonderful times in 2009!


Part of our daily job is to make life easier for others by developing new applications in force.com platform. But sometimes it's not bad to spend some time for ourselves to make our own life a little easier, better and smoother.

In this article I will present a Visualforce Component that would list the record types of an Object in the platform.

Imagine, the Account object has two record types in the force.com platform (Record Types are created by the users based on what these objects represent on their business).

Account Record types:

• Customer
• Partner

In many occasions especially when developing a new wizard you need to first allow the user select what type of record they want to create and then based on that show the correct type of interface to the user.

The solution as to how you can show this to the user is rather simple, but here I actually took the time to create a re-usable component, so you and I won't need to rewrite the code next time!

Here is the Component's Tags:

<apex:component controller="RecordTypeListCon">
<apex:attribute name="sObjectType" description="" type="String" required="true" default="Account" assignTo="{!sObjectType}"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="value" description="" type="String" required="true"></apex:attribute>
<apex:selectList value="{!value}" size="1">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!items}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:selectList>
</apex:component>

The Component has a Controller called "RecordTypeListCon" and is named as "RecordTypeList". It declares two attributes as follow:

• sObjectType: values such as "Account", "Contact", generally the name of your object.
• value: you can capture the result of user's selection by using the attribute in your Vsualforce Controller.

And here goes the code of the component's Controller:

public class RecordTypeListCon {
private List<SelectOption> items;

// property that reads the value from the Component attribute
public string sObjectType
{
get;
set;
}

public List<SelectOption> getItems() {
 List<SelectOption> items = new List<SelectOption>();

 //default value
 items.add(new SelectOption('','--Select Record Type --'));

 //query force.com database to get the record type of the requested object.
 for(RecordType rt: [select id,name from recordtype where sobjecttype=:sObjectType]) {
      items.add(new SelectOption(rt.id,rt.name));
  }

 return items;
}
}

Once you create this component in your Salesforce instance all you need to do when need to the selectList of your object's record types is to:

<c:RecordTypeList value="{!lookupValue}" sObjectType="Account"></c:RecordTypeList>

Enjoy!