Visualforce Development

Save time while gaining complete control over
how your data is organized and formatted—
all with complete Salesforce Lightning Platform integration.

Visualforce Basics

The Salesforce platform is comprehensive, offering separate application development tools for defining the data model, business logic, and user interface of each custom solution. While these tools are robust and offer users the ability to create personalized mobile solutions based on their specific practices, there are some adaptability limitations. Specifically, the interface is fairly rigid in its pre-designed layouts that determine how information is displayed. Buttons always appear above fields, fields always appear above related lists, and custom links can only be applied in specific areas.

To address this limitation and offer developers greater control over how their data is organized and formatted, Lightning offers Visualforce, available in the Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, and Developer Editions. Natively hosted, compiled, and rendered on the Force.com platform,with support provided by our Salesforce Visualforce consulting team, the Visualforce framework centers on two elements: tag-based markup language and standard server-based controllers that power basic database operations. In the language, which is similar to HTML, each tag corresponds to a user interface component, such as a page section, list, or field.

Components can be either coarse or fine-grained depending on the desired compilation speed, and their behavior can be controlled by standard Salesforce logic, or logic assigned by the developer’s custom Apex code, providing greater design flexibility.

Developer-Driven Control

The Visualforce markup can include Visualforce tags, HTML, JavaScript, or any Web-enabled code embedded within an tag. This language controls which user interface components are defined, such as buttons or links, and how they are laid out on the page. Developers can opt to control these components via the standard logic provided on the Lightning Platform, or through custom logic, defined by a class written in Apex.

While any existing standard Force.com controller functionalities must be re-implemented if custom logic is chosen, developers now have the ability to assign new navigation elements and behaviors to components as desired, without leveraging the platform’s pre-designed templates. Even once established, developers can still adjust operation through Apex-driven extensions, which add to or override behaviors in both standard and custom controllers.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a powerful new tool for sales operations that combines the organizational power of traditional CRM with next-generation virtual resources, including custom applications and social media sites, that greatly extend your organization’s sales and collaboration capabilities.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud provides a virtual collaboration space that enables your customer service team to respond to requests for help and information at any time, from any location, across any channel. In our connected world, customers seek out and expect a timely response to their inquiries, and prompt service is vital to ensure customers are not only satisfied, but come back for more.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Created on the Salesforce1 Platform, Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud enables your marketers to build strong and meaningful customer relationships. Foster rich 1:1 customer and prospect interaction using email, social marketing, web, mobile, and pretty much any other marketing vehicle imaginable.

Salesforce Platform

Salesforce Platform enables the creation of both employee-facing and customer-facing applications, connecting your partners, employees, customers, and products quickly and effectively. Applications can be developed by adding custom functionality to the pre-built Salesforce Mobile App, or developers can utilize Mobile SDK, an open source suite of technologies, including REST API and OAuth 2.0, to create custom mobile applications for iOS and Android devices.

Flexibility of Design

Visualforce pages can be used to override certain elements that come standard on the platform, including buttons and tab overview pages. For instance, while “New” is always included as a button within the “Accounts” page, developers can choose to overwrite this element as required to meet their particular design requirements. In their place, custom tabs and dashboard components can be created, as well as new menu items and actions, custom console components, and even new help pages patterned around specific organizational terms. Additionally, as Visualforce markup is ultimately rendered as HTML, developers can integrate its tags with other Web-based user interface technologies, including standard HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and other HTML-executable code for a greater range of design possibilities.

Time-Saving Innovation

While customizing their Visualforce markup, developers can edit the language in the same window in which the resulting page is shown, for tangible verification of design and edits. This window, called the Editor Pane, includes auto-completion and syntax highlighting as time-saving benefits. Development time also improves with the application’s concise syntax, which implements the same functionality as an s-control, used to display custom HTML in a page or tab, but with 90% fewer lines of code.

This approach not only saves development time, but enables any team member to contribute new ideas and designs for Visualforce pages. The Model-View-Controller (MVC) development style of Visualforce also helps improve team efficiency by splitting the application’s user interface and business logic, allowing designers to focus on the application’s aesthetics while developers work simultaneously on the Apex-driven controllers that define its business logic.

Employees can create on-the-go components from anywhere, at any time, through “quick fixes,” which create new elements by simple keyboard operation. For instance, if an employee has an idea for the name of a new Visualforce page, he can simply type it into his URL, and the new page is automatically generated.

Total Platform Integration

Because Visualforce pages are integrated tightly on the Lightning Platform, they provide the same performance as standard Salesforce pages, no matter the amount of data incorporated. Visualforce pages are also stored as metadata, so they don't need to be rewritten when the platform is upgraded. They are simply upgraded along with the rest of the system, eliminating downtime and allowing your team to continually design, develop, create, and implement customized mobile applications fitted to your business demands.

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Sales Cloud

Combine the organizational power of traditional CRM with next-gen virtual resources like machine learning/AI-powered Einstein Analytics, custom applications, full social media integration, and much more.

Service Cloud

Harness the ultimate virtual collaboration space for customer service teams bent on engaging, delighting, and building customer trust and relationship—at any time, from any location, across any channel.

Marketing Cloud

Build meaningful, undisruptable customer relationships, engaging on their terms and in their preferred channels, creating rich 1:1 customer and prospect experiences using email, mobile, web, and social marketing.

Lightning Platform

Instantly connect partners, employees, customers, and products, customizing pre-built Salesforce apps or creating tailored solutions using Mobile SDK for streamlined iOS and Android app development.

Apex
Development

Take full advantage of your ability to create new apps custom tailored to your business’ unique requirements, leveraging the seasoned Apex development resources on Tokara’s consulting team.

Visualforce
Development

Gain total control over how your Salesforce data is organized and formatted with Visualforce, knowing our Visualforce consulting resources are available to support you just as much or as little as you’d like.

Salesforce-Pivotal Connector

Gradually transfer your workforce from one CRM to the other, passing data in both directions. Uses Pivotal scheduled script service (near real-time sync) and connects to Salesforce using its Rest API.

SF Managed
Services

Focus valuable internal technical resources on business-critical innovations while reducing hardware-related operating and capital costs—let use handle ‘all-things-admin’ for your Salesforce investment.

Massive thanks to the entire Tokara Solutions Team! Having worked closely with their experienced CRM consultants and engineers, this has been the best deployment of Salesforce I have ever had at Viant. Tokara Solutions is a wonderful team to work with! I am looking forward to what is to come!”

Amy Harrington, Sr. Director, SFDC Administration & Business AnalyticsViant

Tokara Offers Unmatched
Salesforce Resources

Tokara fields top-tier Salesforce resources, as well as a select set of hybrid Pivotal/Salesforce engineers, developers, and consultants, whose expertise allows them to operate fluidly and effectively in and around all flavors of CRM, handling the full suite of Salesforce applications as well as Pivotal-to-Salesforce transitions.

We have a valuable partner in Tokara. My Tokara consultant and his team understand me, our Salesforce organization, and us as a company and really ‘get’ how we work—we need it to be right, but we can’t spend millions of dollars re-architecting our whole organization every time we want to do a project. Now, we are completely in synchronization with zero errors and have a much more robust integration schedule. The team at Tokara has ... exceeded all my expectations.

Chief Technology OfficerFine Arts Retailer

Tokara Salesforce CRM Resources & Downloads

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Salesforce Integration for Leading Fine Arts Retailer (Tokara Solutions, Testimonial Datasheet)
VisualForce Development Salesforce Consulting Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
Apex Development Salesforce Consulting Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
Hosted Salesforce Integration Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
Salesforce Platform Consulting Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consulting Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
Salesforce Service Cloud Consulting Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
Salesforce CRM Consulting Services (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
CRM Solutions (Tokara Solutions, Datasheet)
CRM Consulting (Tokara Solutions, Brochure)

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