How to toggle off sforce.connection.update DML updates in a visualforce readOnly page?

Question

Hello Salesforce community,

• I have 2 vf pages, and 1 vfp component.

• Each page wraps the same component. The only difference in the pages is that one apex:page tag has readOnly="true" whereas the other page uses readOnly="false".

• The visualforce component has sforce.connection.update routines defined within it which ideally would be toggled off when the page's readOnly="true". That seems to not be the case so I'm looking for an alternative way to cleanly deliver a page that reuses my component but disables all sforce.connection.update calls.

The confusing part is that despite readOnly="true" the sforce.connection.update DML updates are somehow allowed to occur (for what its worth im a system admin)

Given the setup above and without changing Profile object or field security, how can I cleanly/more-fully disable DML from occurring in the component on the page that has readOnly="true"?

Here are related articles, but I still am unsure why my readOnly="true" hack is not disabling DML.

• https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.pages.meta/pages/pages_controller_readonly_context_pagelevel.htm
• DML Statement from @readonly page

Thanks in advance for any ideas / suggestions,

Answer 1

The readOnly attribute only prevents Apex code on the page from performing any DML, in exchange for higher governor limits (1,000,000 query rows). The sforce.connection script uses the API directly, not Apex, and is thus not subject to this restriction (it's also not subject to the 50,000 query row limit, as it can retrieve up to 50,000,000 rows as an API call). If you want to restrict DML operations in the component, write a parameter on the component to accept a Boolean value, and have your script check that value before performing DML.