VisualForce Global Template

Question

I'm relatively new to Salesforce, and I've been tasked with cleaning upon some of our VisualForce pages as they are in a bit of a mess.

At the top of every page we are constantly including various static resources such as CSS and JavaScripts. I want to be able to move these imports into a global template, so I can define their import once, and they are automatically available for all pages. I can't seem to find how to do this in the Salesforce documentation.

Am I able to achieve this, or is the Salesforce standard to constantly copy the same static resource imports on all our VisualForce pages?

Answer 1

You can create templates using apex:composition, apex:insert, and apex:define.

Basically, create a template using something like this:

<apex:page id="templatePage">
    <apex:includeScript ...
    <apex:stylesheet ...
    <apex:insert name="body" />
</apex:page>

Then, each of your other pages uses that as a template:

<apex:page ...>
    <apex:composition template="templatePage">
       <apex:define name="body">
           <!-- this page's unique content -->
       </apex:define>
    </apex:composition>
</apex:page>

There's not really a way to retrofit your template onto every page (you'll need to edit each page once), but the change is trivial; just copy the composition and define lines into your page right before the usual content, and then close the tag near the end. This should only be a few minutes work per page, including cleaning up the includes that will be removed as a result of the effort. You can include anything you want in your composition element, and your composition can be as complex as you'd like.