Visualforce and the Native User Interface

Force.com provides many places for Visualforce pages to be integrated into its native user interface. You can embed Visualforce pages inside standard user interface pages, override the buttons that navigate between pages, override the standard pages entirely, and add buttons and tabs to navigate to an entirely custom user interface. Areas of the native user interface extensible through Visualforce are summarized here:

Standard pages—Standard pages provide the default user interface for maintaining records in the Force.com database. These pages can be overridden with your custom Visualforce pages.

Standard buttons—Standard buttons normally navigate the user to standard pages, such as the New button, which moves the user to the edit page for a new record. But these buttons can be remapped to your custom Visualforce pages, to inject an additional visual step before the standard page or to hide it altogether.

Page layouts—Page layouts define the position of fields, buttons, and related lists in the native user interface. Visualforce pages can be embedded within page layouts.

Custom buttons and links—Custom buttons appear at the top and bottom of standard pages and links within a detail page. They can navigate the user to a Visualforce page.

Custom tabs—Custom tabs are added to an application and appear at the top of the Web browser under the application banner. A Visualforce page can be configured as a custom tab.