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Davser Visualforce documentation
I'm not sure this is the right forum for suggested improvements to the Visualforce documentation, it it isn't, perhaps someone could advise the correct place.
I think that having screenshots of resultant output in the Visualforce documentation would be extremely beneficial. For instance, in the Standard Component Reference section, every component has some sample code displayed, which is very useful. It would be even more useful to have a screenshot of what the output of that code is, as displayed to the end user in a browser window. It makes sense given that we are dealing with markup, and would allow a much quicker evaluation from the developer perspective on whether the component does what they need.
Even better would be something similar to the documentation of the Yahoo User Interface components. They have many samples which can be used interactively to understand what the code is doing. This may be more difficult to achieve with Visualforce, however it would be invaluable in allowing people to quickly understand Visualforce components, and how they can be used together.
Something I find consistently (and frustratingly) absent from both APEX and Visualforce feature documentation is coverage of both the single element case and the set of elements case...or perhaps more accurately just the absence of the set of elements case. I tend to think of ideal documentation a bit like and Inductive proof: to be complete it must not only show the first or single instance case but it must then show the iterative case. For instance, the documentation for controller extensions (summer 08 doc) illustrates the controller.getRecord() method...but no controller.getRecords() method. This begs the question, how would one set up a controller extension for a list view? As the controller class itself doesn't appear to be part of the reference section either (or if it is it's not indexed), one can't even look there for more details.
Speaking of indexes, it would be awesome to have a click-thru component reference board a la php's documentation. these boards are great, but such a reference would offer a kind of self organizing feature whereas no, searching through the boards to find out whether your question's already been answered is a bit of a crap-shoot even for those of us who generally try to look first and then post.
Also, has there been anythought to a code share board, specifically for already tested working snippets? We just made a nifty little child-object two page visualforce embedded view that lets a user view the list of child record and then view, edit, or delete one of them without leaving the parent page. it's simple and somewhat obvious and yet a pretty exciting usability enhancement according to our users.
A few of us are using code.google.com to host visualforce useful pages and controllers.
http://code.google.com/p/visualforce-components/source/browse
if you would like to contribute, send an email and we can add you as a contributor, we plan to expand this area soon.
or just post your code here and we can pull it out and put it up on the Google area.
thanks!