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!

A Picklist Component For Your Visualforce Pages

The last couple of months, numerous times in order to view picklist values in a form either for filter the views or creating custom data entry forms, I had to come up with ways to get around the limitations and somehow hook the inputField with the picklist to show what I needed.

Now, with the Salesforce Winter 09 improvements now it is much easier to tackle this issue.

In this article we will design an Apex component that gets the picklist name as attribute and renders the picklist values in form of a dropdown list.

This component will be really useful for non-multi-select picklists. I will post another article on multiselect picklists in near future.

Let's see how the Component will be added to the Page:

<c:picklist id="industryPicklist" value="{!accountIndustry}" picklistField="Industry" systemEntity="Account" usedefaultvalue="true"/>

What you need to define for the component is what object, which picklist field of that Object and a property of your page's Controller allowing you to read what user's choice was.

Now let's dive into the code and see how this component is developed. Like most other Visualforce page developments our component has two parts. The User Interface elements and the controller behind it.

<apex:component controller="picklistController">
<apex:attribute name="SystemEntity" description="" type="String" required="true" default="Account" assignTo="{!systemObject}"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="picklistField" description="" type="String" required="true" default="Type" assignTo="{!picklist_Field}"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="value" description="" type="String" required="true"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="defaultLabel" description="default value to be shown to user" type="String" assignTo="{!listDefaultLabel}" default="--None--"></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="defaultValue" description="default value to be shown to user" type="String" assignTo="{!listDefaultValue}" default=""></apex:attribute>
<apex:attribute name="useDefaultValue" description="whether a default value to be shown or not" type="Boolean" assignTo="{!haveDefaultValue}" default="false"></apex:attribute>

<apex:selectList value="{!value}" size="1">
<apex:selectOptions value="{!items}"></apex:selectOptions>
</apex:selectList>
</apex:component>

The Component has only a selectList and a few attributes. Below are a list of attributes used for this component:

• systemEntity: API name of the Object which has a picklist field
• picklistField: API name of the Object's picklist field
• value: This field should be bound to a property in parent Page's Controller
• defaultLabel: Label of the default value shown to user, only visible when useDefaultValue is set to true.
• defaultValue: Value of the default item shown to user, only visible when useDefaultValue is set to true.
• useDefaultValue: A Boolean value tells the component whether to show a default value or not.

Now let's see how the Controller is look like:

public class picklistController {

//System object name, such as Account

private String systemObject;

public String getSystemObject() {

return systemObject;

}

public void setSystemObject(String value)

{

systemObject = value;

}

//picklist name such as "Type" of account object

private String picklist_Field;

public String getPicklist_Field() {

return picklist_Field;

}

public void setPicklist_Field(String value) {

picklist_Field= value;

}

//default item's value

public String listDefaultValue

{

get;

set;

}

//default item's label

public String listDefaultLabel

{

get;

set;

}

// whether the default item should be shown

public Boolean haveDefaultValue

{

get;

set;

}

public List getItems()

{

List entries_local;

if (systemObject != null)

{

//use GlobalDecribe to get a list of all available Objects

Map gd = Schema.getGlobalDescribe();

Set objectKeys = gd.keySet();

for(String objectKey: objectKeys)

{

//Iterate through all objects to locate selected Object

if (objectKey == systemObject.toLowerCase())

{

Schema.SObjectType systemObjectType = gd.get(objectKey);

Schema.DescribeSObjectResult r = systemObjectType.getDescribe();

Map M = r.fields.getMap();

Set fieldNames = M.keySet();

if (picklist_Field == null)

{

break;

}

//iterate through all fields of the object to locate the picklist field

for(String fieldName: fieldNames)

{

if (fieldName == picklist_Field.toLowerCase())

{

Schema.SObjectField field = M.get(fieldName);

Schema.DescribeFieldResult fieldDesc = field.getDescribe();

//extract the picklist values

entries_local = fieldDesc.getPicklistValues();

break;

}

}

}

}//end for

}

//Loading the picklist values and default item for our selectList

List options = new List();

//take care of Default value

if (haveDefaultValue == true)

{

if (listDefaultValue == null)

listDefaultValue = '';

if (listDefaultLabel== null)

listDefaultLabel = '--None--';

options.add(new SelectOption(listDefaultValue,listDefaultLabel));

}

//take care of picklist values

if (entries_local != null)

{

for(Schema.PicklistEntry picklistItem : entries_local)

{

options.add(new SelectOption(picklistItem.getValue(),picklistItem.getLabel()));

}

}

return options;

}

}