[SalesForce] Adding an ad hoc lookup to Visualforce page

I have a totally custom visualforce page, with a number of elements on it, backed by controller instance variables, and I'm using apex:inputField to successfully render them all perfectly.

I now wish to allow the user to "select" a contact, and then I have an Apex function to do some stuff to the chosen contact.

I have created a Contact instance variable (as per all the others) like so:

public Contact contactLookup { get; set; }

but then, on the VisualForce page, if I try to render the input via:

<apex:inputField value="{!contactLookup}" />

I get an error message:

    Error: Could not resolve the entity from <apex:inputField> value binding '{!contactLookup}'. <apex:inputField> can only be used with SObjects, or objects that are Visualforce field component resolvable.

Which is fair enough "Contact" is not associated with an input type. So my question is, how do I get the good old "Look up" box to appear on the page?

As seen here, from another standard page, for Account:
Account lookup

I'm fully aware of how to do this when using a standard controller/custom field – but not when the lookup is merely backed by an instance variable like this?

Best Answer

You should not reference a Sobject, reference its field instead. Correct way is:

public Account contactLookup { get; set; }

<apex:inputField value="{!contactLookup.contact}" />

<apex:inputField> binds with sObject's field not the whole sObject. If it is a lookup then it will have lookup style.

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] Issue displaying lookup inputField through wrapper class results

ISSUE 1 :
You are trying to bind an instance of Financial_Account__c to the inputField as per your wrapper class (your fa is type of Financial_Account__c). This doesn't make sense with an inputField. See the value attribute here in the documentation. You have to bind a field of an object as the value

ISSUE 2 :
You can directly bind the holdingResults list since the Financial_Account__c is a lookup.

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!holdingResults}" var="mhItem" id="pgTable1">
    <apex:column headerValue="Financial Account" id="movetoaccount">
        <apex:inputField value="{!mhItem.Financial_Account__c}" />                    
    </apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

UPDATE : with the above code, you should be able to see a table like as below. pageblocktable
Retrieve all necessary fields from Holding__c obj according to the relationships in your query (Name,Financial_Account__c,Financial_Account__r.Name,etc.) and just set the Holding__c in your constructor (I don't see a value of setting the Financial_Account__c as well here). Then you can bind them in your VF page as below.

<apex:pageBlockTable value="{!holdingList}" var="mhItem" id="pgTable1">
    <apex:column headerValue="Financial Account" id="movetoaccount">
        <apex:inputField value="{!mhItem.maho.Financial_Account__c}" />                    
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column headerValue="Test" id="movetoaccount1">
        <apex:inputField value="{!mhItem.maho.Financial_Account__r.Name}" />                    
    </apex:column>
    <apex:column headerValue="Halding Name" id="movetoaccount2">
        <apex:inputField value="{!mhItem.maho.Name}" />                    
    </apex:column>
</apex:pageBlockTable>

[SalesForce] Apex InputField value binding error

I think there are two issues:

apex:inputField can only bind to an SObject field (as it takes the type and label from the field metadata) but you are trying to bind it to a String; use apex:inputText instead
you have not provided get/set methods for OrderItem.test; one way to accomplish this is to change the code to initialise in the constructor and then use a public String test {get; set;} Apex Property

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] Issue displaying lookup inputField through wrapper class results

[SalesForce] Apex InputField value binding error

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