Manage Navigation

The good news is that “classic” Visualforce navigation continues to work. The better news is that your Visualforce pages can take advantage of the new Lightning Experience mechanisms, too.

The first thing we might mean by navigation is user interface elements on the screen. You click something, and something happens. For example, you click the Accounts item in the navigation menu, and you go to the Accounts object home page. You click the New button, and a record entry form appears. You choose a custom action from a quick actions menu, and you launch a custom process. And so on. Those buttons and menu items are navigation elements.

The design of the navigation system, the user interface in Lightning Experience, is very different from Salesforce Classic. We’re not going to talk about those differences here, but you’ll want to be familiar with where everything moves when you switch between the two user experiences. You can learn more about that right here in Trailhead, in the Navigating Lightning Experience and Setup unit.

Another, less visible kind of navigation is the “something happens” part of the above. Behind the scenes, Salesforce decides what’s going to happen when you select an item in a menu, or click a link or button. Much of this navigation is built into Salesforce already, while other aspects are customizable—for example, overriding actions with Visualforce pages. But all of this navigation is managed by code written by Salesforce.

And then there’s navigation in your own apps—apps that use your code to control application flow. When your custom action opens a form and the user clicks save, where do you go? When your running code makes a decision about where the user should go next, and sends them there. This is what we’re going to talk about in this unit.

Remember also that the Standard Controller returns a PageReference from its action methods. So, your existing navigation, whether you’re using the Standard Controller or your own custom controller code, continues to work as you expect.

There’s a great future in JavaScript—and that future is here today. Many Visualforce developers are using JavaScript heavily in their apps, and that use continues to grow. Classic Visualforce works, and will continue to work for a long time. But as developers adopt Visualforce features such as Remote Objects and JavaScript remoting, more of their apps’ behavior migrates from the server side, where PageReference is the rule, to the browser and JavaScript, where there’s no such thing as a PageReference.

In the Lightning Experience (and the Salesforce app) world, there are rules and tools for building navigation in JavaScript. We’ll cover the rules, which are mostly about what not to do, in a little bit. Let’s talk about the right way to do things first.

Lightning Experience manages navigation using events. The navigation event framework is made available as a JavaScript utility object that provides a number of functions that make creating programmatic navigation straightforward. The sforce.one object is automatically added to Visualforce pages when they run in Lightning Experience. This object provides a number of functions that trigger navigation events when the functions are called. To use these functions, you can call them directly from your page’s JavaScript code, or you can attach calls as click (or other) handlers to elements on the page.

Important

The sforce.one object isn’t available in Salesforce Classic. Any code that uses it should test for the existence of sforce.one first.

For additional details about using these functions, and the parameters they accept, see Navigation and Messaging with the sforce.one Object in this unit’s Resources.

• Trailhead: Navigation and Setup in Lightning Experience
• Trailhead: Customization: Create Custom Buttons and Links
• Visualforce Developer’s Guide: PageReference Class
• Visualforce Developer’s Guide: Dynamic References to Action Methods Using $Action
• Salesforce Mobile App Developer Guide: Navigation and Messaging with the sforce.one Object