Pagination - rendered is false for standardController

Question

I am prepared to be flamed for asking such a newbie question (which is similar to others) but I'll suffer the shame if I can get this resolved. Since my background is mostly procedural code, I'm studying SalesForce's "VisualForce in Practice" and am coding as I go. In Chapter 4 (list controllers), they have me list contacts and (supposedly) have Next/Previous buttons appear.

When I code the following, no buttons appear. I know that the rendered is evaluating as false (because the buttons don't appear) and suspect that the code doesn't exist for HasPrevious/HasNext. In the examples I've seen (Display more than 3000 records in a VF page and http://forceguru.blogspot.in/2011/04/pagination-in-salesforce.html), they have a controller which has code for HasPrevious/HasNext. The book discusses a standardSetController but doesn't prompt me to write any code for it.

If I'm using a standardController, then shouldn't this code exist? I'm not supposed to write an extension for this, am I? If not, why do the buttons not show?

Thanks.

Mike

Code:

<apex:page standardController="Contact" recordSetVar="contacts">
    <apex:form >
        <apex:pageBlock title="Simple Contact List">
            <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!contacts}" var="c" rows="5">
                <apex:column value="{!c.Id}"/>
                <apex:column value="{!c.FirstName}"/>
                <apex:column value="{!c.LastName}"/>
                <apex:column value="{!c.Email}"/>
             </apex:pageBlockTable>
             <apex:pageBlock > 
                 <apex:pageBlockButtons location="bottom">
                     <apex:commandLink action="{!Previous}" value="Previous Page" rendered="{!HasPrevious}"/>
                     <apex:commandLink action="{!Next}" value="Next Page" rendered="{!HasNext}"/>
                 </apex:pageBlockButtons>
            </apex:pageBlock>
         </apex:pageBlock>
     </apex:form>
</apex:page>

Answer 1

There are two types of standard controller:

• StandardController
• StandardSetController

and specifying a recordSetVar in the apex:page causes the second type to be used. Listed in its available methods are getHasNext and getHasPrevious and these can be referenced without the "get".

When I paste your page into an org I do see the previous/next links. I get 20 contacts at a time - if you have less than 20 contacts the pagination may be automatically switched off.

To start with you do not need to write a controller extension: that is where you may later add custom behaviour.