Visualforce Pages and Data Sets

Up until this point, your Visualforce pages have been accessing data through the single starting point of a Position record. Visualforce pages can also be used for retrieving sets of data, with a lot of built-in functionality that already exists on the Force Platform. You can retrieve sets of data from any object using a standard controller, leading to the name of the feature, standard set controllers.

In this final section of this introductory chapter on Visualforce, you will see how you can extend the default list functionality of the Force Platform with standard set controllers. With this capability, you can create pages that display multiple records from a single object, as well as use some of the built-in functionality that comes with Force Platform list views.

The end result of your efforts will be a page that can be used to replace the standard list view for Job Applications, shown by default whenever a user clicks the Job Applications tab. This new page will give your users everything they expect from a list view—and more.