Visualforce

Standard Controller

Custom Controller

Standard List Controller

Standard List Controller - To create Visualforce pages that can display or act on a set of records. The standard list controller provides many powerful, automatic behaviors such as querying for records of a specific object and making the records available in a collection variable, as well as filtering of and pagination through the results. Adding the standard list controller to a page is very similar to adding the standard (record) controller, but with the intent of working with many records at once, instead of one record at a time.

Display a List of Records

Use the standard list controller and an iteration component, such as <apex:pageBlockTable>, to display a list of records. The standard (record) controller makes it easy to get a single record loaded into a variable you can use on a Visualforce page. The standard list controller is similar, except instead of a single record, it loads a list, or collection, of records into the variable.

Because you’re dealing with a collection, instead of an individual record, you need to use an iteration component to display them. An iteration component works with a collection of similar items, instead of on a single value. An iteration component loops through its collection, and for each record, generates some output based on a template you provide as part of the component markup.

ContactList.vfp

<apex:page standardController="Contact" recordSetVar="contacts">
    <apex:pageBlock title="Contacts List">
    
      <!-- Contacts List -->
      <apex:pageBlockTable value="{! contacts}" var="ct">
            <apex:column value="{! ct.FirstName }"/>
            <apex:column value="{! ct.LastName }"/>
            <apex:column value="{! ct.Email }"/>
            <apex:column value="{! ct.Account.Name }"/>
      </apex:pageBlockTable>
      
    </apex:pageBlock>
</apex:page>

Using a Standard List Controller

First you set the standardController attribute on the apex:page component, then you set the recordSetVar attribute on the same component. The standardController attribute sets the object to work with, just like with the standard controller. The recordSetVar sets the name of the variable to be created with the collection of records, here, {! contacts }. By convention, this variable is usually named the plural of the object name.

apex:pageBlockTable is an iteration component that generates a table of data, complete with platform styling. Here’s what’s going on in the table markup.

• The value attribute of apex:pageBlockTable is set to the variable loaded by the standard list controller, {! contacts }. This is the list of records that apex:pageBlockTable will work with.
• For each record in that list, one record at a time, apex:pageBlockTable assigns that record to the variable named in the apex:pageBlockTable’s var attribute. In this case, that variable is named ct.
• For each record, apex:pageBlockTable constructs a new row in the table, using the row defined by the set of apex:column components within the body of apex:pageBlockTable. The apex:column components, in turn, use the ct variable that represents the current record to pull out the field values for that record.
• Outside of the loop, apex:pageBlockTable uses the fields in the apex:column components to create column headers, by looking up the label for each field.