Write a template in Visualforce

For this example I’ll create a Visualforce page named templatepage, which will be the template for the page. Here is the code for template page:

<apex:page>
    <apex:insert name="head"/><br/>
    <apex:outputText>This is the default text that will appear in every page.</apex:outputText>
    <apex:insert name="body"/>
</apex:page>

In the above code we can see that this page is like any normal Visualforce page except that there is a code which is not doing anything in it’s own. That tag is <apex:insert>, which acts as the markup for the content to be added in the template.

Next we’ll create a page which will use this page as a template. Let’s name this myPage. The code will be as follows:

<apex:page controller="mycontroller">
    <apex:composition template="templatepage">
    	<apex:define name="head">
        	Account List
        </apex:define><br/>
        <apex:define name="body">
        	<apex:dataTable value="{!list}" var="l">
            	<apex:column value="{!l.name}" headerValue="Name"/>
                <apex:column value="{!l.industry}" headerValue="Industry"/>
            </apex:dataTable>
        </apex:define>
    </apex:composition>
</apex:page>

As we can see in this code that the template is used with the help of the <apex:composition> and the attribute template tells which page to use as the template. The <apex:define> tells where to insert the new code. It’s name attribute selects the markup, which we previously defined, to insert the code.

For this particular example I have also written an apex class which is feeding the datatable:

public class mycontroller {

    /**
     * Webkul Software.
     *
     * @category  Webkul
     * @author    Webkul
     * @copyright Copyright (c) 2010-2017 Webkul Software Private Limited (https://webkul.com)
     * @license   https://store.webkul.com/license.html
     **/

    public list<account> getlist(){
        list<account> acc = [select name, industry from account limit 1000];
        return acc;
    }
}

Once you have completed creating the page you can see the output by previewing the mypage, it will be something like this.

That’s all for how to write a template in visualforce, for any further queries feel free to add a ticket at:

https://webkul.uvdesk.com/en/customer/create-ticket/

Or let us know your views on how to make this code better, in comments section below.