[SalesForce] How to stop refreshing the entire VF page when command link is clicked

When a command link is clicked on page it is refreshing the whole page and asking to enter require fields. But I want to enter required fields only after clicking the command link.

Note:Command link is used to open a new VF page

VF Page:

                <apex:inputField value="{!Account.Name}" required = true>

                   </apex:inputField>

              <apex:outputPanel >
              <apex:outputField  value="{!Account.Input__c}" />
             <apex:commandLink  action="{!redirectToVFPage}" target="_blank">
</apex:commandLink>
             </apex:outputPanel>

Best Answer

You have two things going on here:

Refresh - Without rerender the entire page is reloaded
Required fields - If the field is required it must be populated when there is no rerender

Here is the most basic example to help you out, put it in your org and play with it a bit to see the effect of different options.

Class

public class myExample{

    public Account acc {get; set;}

    public myExample(){
        acc = New Account();
    }
    public void updateCurrentRecord(){
        //Do some stuff        
    }

}

VF Page

<apex:page id="myExamplePage" controller="myExample">
    <apex:pageMessages id="msgs"/>
    <apex:form >
        <apex:commandLink action="{!updateCurrentRecord}" reRender="thePanel, msgs" value="Click me"/>
            <apex:inputField value="{!acc.Name}" required="true"/>

        <apex:outputpanel layout="block" id="thePanel">

            {!acc.Name}

        </apex:outputpanel>


    </apex:form>


</apex:page>

Note you need to add the Page Messages component to see the required validation error when using rerender. Also, displaying the error at the field level requires you to NOT use the rerender attribute.

Its all a bit confusing.....

This will not refresh the page but will refresh the output panel to show the update. You could leave the rerender=none and debug the values in the controller and see that it works.

If you remove the rerender from the command link, you will see your issue return.

Using Immediate=true will not send the value to the controller and the thePanel panel will be blank on rerender.

If used without rerender - Page will refresh and your values will not save
If used with the rerender - Page will not refresh and values will not be saved

Another item to review would be action regions, but may not be applicable in your use case. If you need to submit part of the form and not the others (having required fields) look into that.

Only use immediate=true when you want to cancel any inputs and do the action immediately - think a cancel redirect. If you want to open your new page without accepting any inputs the user entered then do use immediate=true

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] How to circumvent validation without using immediate=true

It looks like the fields you want to populate are themselves required, so you're trying to submit required, blank fields and have them populated by the back end. If that's true, you can't do it except with immediate="true". And as you say then the setters don't run so you have no values.

Wrapping them in <apex:actionRegion /> won't help as they're still going back to the server blank, which is the problem. Action regions can help when you a bunch of fields you don't want to be validated in one area of the VF, and you want to submit a different area for your action.

You can try

populating them front end using js
keeping your action as immediate but passing the field values back to it in <apex:param />. You'd probably need JS for that too, to populate the params from the screen input fields.

I'd do it front end, if it didn't include adding new items to the list. I've never tried to use front end javascript to add new items to a list, but the idea of using something like JS Remoting and then redrawing the screen seems like it would take a long time and possibly not work anyway.

[SalesForce] Return Boolean From Action Function called from JS

You could wrap a script in an outputPanel and rerender it on every save. Then you'd have the most up-to-date value of the variable. eg:

<apex:outputPanel id="saveResultScript">
    <script>
    function confirmProceed (){
        var dataSaved = "{!JSENCODE(dataSaved)}";
        if(dataSaved == 'false' && !isDirty) {
            if(confirm('Are you sure you wish to continue - any unsaved changes will be lost.')) {
            }
        }else {
            return false;
        }
    }
    </script>
    </apex:outputText>
</apex:outputPanel>

Outside this block we have another script tag which we'll put the isDirty variable (so it doesn't get rerendered on save)

<script>
var isDirty = false;
</script>

As long as this entire panel is rerendered on every save, we can check the newly updated dataSaved variable and the locally updated isDirty variable (you said you had a variable that performs this function on any onenter event)

This way, we don't need to talk to the controller for confirmProceed to work. Hopefully this helps a little. I feel a little unsure of your requirements, but this is something that I have done several times myself and it works pretty well.

Oh and using a RemoteAction as suggested in the comments would probably work too, as long as you keep in mind that RemoteAction methods need to be static. They definitely return a value immediately for you to act on.

Update One last thought - you could use a RemoteAction to save your data and then (depending on the result) call an actionFunction to update the dataSaved var on the controller non-statically - while you can do what you want without waiting for a rerender - this should be very performant.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] How to circumvent validation without using immediate=true

[SalesForce] Return Boolean From Action Function called from JS

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