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Tools for Visualforce Development

Before you begin to develop Visualforce pages and components, familiarize yourself with the different places to create them.

  • Develop Visualforce pages with Visualforce development mode. Visualforce development mode is only available for users with the Customize Application permission. Development mode provides you with:

    • A special development footer on every Visualforce page that includes the page’s view state, any associated controller, a link to the component reference documentation, and a page markup editor that offers highlighting, find-replace functionality, and auto-suggest for component tag and attribute names.
    • The ability to define new Visualforce pages just by entering a unique URL.
    • Error messages that include more detailed stack traces than what standard users receive. To enable Visualforce development mode:
    1. From your personal settings, enter Advanced User Details in the Quick Find box, then select Advanced User Details. No results? Enter Personal Information in the Quick Find box, then select Personal Information.
    2. Click Edit.
    3. Select the Development Mode checkbox.
    4. Optionally, select the Show View State in Development Mode checkbox to enable the View State tab on the development footer. This tab is useful for monitoring the performance of your Visualforce pages.
    5. Click Save.

  • Develop Visualforce pages through the Salesforce user interface. From Setup, enter Visualforce Pages in the Quick Find box, then select Visualforce Pages. For Visualforce components, from Setup, enter Components in the Quick Find box, then select Visualforce Components.

  • Develop Visualforce pages with Visual Studio Code, a lightweight and extensible code editor. Salesforce Extensions for Visual Studio Code includes tools for developing on the Salesforce platform. It provides features for working with development orgs (scratch orgs, sandboxes, and DE orgs), Apex, Aura components, and Visualforce.

  • Using the Development Mode Footer

  • About the Visualforce Editor

  • Accessing Metrics for Your Visualforce Pages

    To query metrics on the Visualforce pages in your org, use the VisualforceAccessMetrics object in the Salesforce SOAP API.