apex:column header value not displaying with apex:inputField

Question

The docs for <apex:column /> states that the default behavior of the headerValue displays the field label when using an <apex:inputField/> or an <apex:outputField/> tag.

Note also that specifying a value for this attribute overrides the default header label that appears if you use an inputField or outputField in the column body.

However the header value is blank when I do so.

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!productsToInsert}" var="p" id="orderItemTable" >
    <apex:column>
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.Name}" />
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column>
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.Family}">
    </apex:inputField>
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column>
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.isActive}" />
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column >
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.Initial_Inventory__c}" />
    </apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

How is this supposed to work with nesting inputFields inside the Apex Column body?

Answer 1

I think you misread the documentation.

From apex:column docs

Note that if you specify an sObject field as the value attribute for an , the associated label for that field is used as the column header by default.

It's clear that we don't need to supply headerValue when we set the value attribute of apex:column. However, when we add tags like apex:inputField or apex:outputField, we need to supply headerValue which can be done as follows without actually hardcoding the label text.

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!productsToInsert}" var="p" id="orderItemTable" >
    <apex:column headerValue="{!$ObjectType.Product2.Fields.Name.Label}">
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.Name}" />
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column headerValue="{!$ObjectType.Product2.Fields.Family.Label}">
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.Family}" />
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column headerValue="{!$ObjectType.Product2.Fields.IsActive.Label}">
        <apex:inputField value="{!p.IsActive}" />
    </apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

We can use $ObjectType global merge field to access object/field schema in Visualforce.

Hope this helps.