Way to create a Visualforce page FROM a Visualforce page?

Question

I'm wondering if there's a way to create a visualforce page that lists all the objects (standard & custom) in a Salesforce org and each to next object there is a button called "Create Page" which, when pressed, will create a Visualforce page with that object's controller?

Or could this be possible with a set of Triggers?

Answer 1

Not natively - Apex and Visualforce do not have direct access to the MetaData API, so you would need to approach it similar to other API integrations. You might check out FinancialForce's apex-mdapi library: https://github.com/financialforcedev/apex-mdapi

Answer 2

You can knock this out fairly simply by using the Ajax Toolkit within your visualforce page, which is capable of creating and updating visualforce via create and update calls. Here is an example of a page that updates itself, recoding the name of whomever visits it:

<apex:page showHeader="true" sidebar="true" title="???">

    <apex:includeScript value="/soap/ajax/25.0/connection.js"/>
    <apex:includeScript value="/soap/ajax/25.0/apex.js"/>

    <div>
        Who has visited this page so far:<br /><br />
        WHOSE NEXT?
    </div>

    <script>
        sforce.connection.sessionId = '{!$Api.Session_ID}';

        function printUsername(result) {
            result         = result.getArray('records');
            var next       = 'WHOSE NEXT?';
            var newName    = '{!$User.FirstName & " " & $User.LastName} <br/>' + next;

            result[0].Markup = result[0].Markup.replace(next, newName);
            sforce.connection.update(result);
        }

        sforce.connection.query(
            "SELECT Id, Markup FROM ApexPage WHERE Name = 'Mystery'", 
            { onSuccess : printUsername });
    </script>

</apex:page>

Answer 3

If you want complete flexibility, you will have to go for metadata api. There is metadata API wrapper classes developed by financial force team. Details can be found in below link,

https://github.com/financialforcedev/apex-mdapi