Visualforce - Beyond Basics Series 14 - Page not just for tags

What the page can contain ?

In broad sense, visualforce page contains visualforce tags & optionally html, css & javascript. Most developers expect it to contain that standard HTML page contains.

Can it contain other than HTML contents ?

yes. visualforce is not designed to be just the HTML content. It could be following,

•   PDF
•   Javascript
•   CSS
•   CSV
•   MS Word

It could be any type that W3 standard supports.

How to achieve that ?

we need to pass the content type attribute to the page tag. Then, it will expect the content to be in that format.

Where is the code ?

For illustration, i have given the page for csv file & javascript. When you load this page, these pages will get downloaded, because, it's not a html page & cannot be loaded.

	<apex:page contentType="text/csv#MyReportData.csv">
	Id, Name, Date, IsClosed
	0a123432434, TestOpp, 12/12/2016, true
	</apex:page>

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	<apex:page contentType="text/javascript#MyScript.js">
	function globalFunction() {
	alert('Hi, im global function');
	}
	</apex:page>

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub