More internal goodies

Besides standard controllers, there are a lot of other built-in functionalities in the Salesforce1 Platform that you can leverage from your Visualforce pages without code. Most of these items are configurable from the GUI by a nonprogrammer. Just like we said earlier, if you don't have to write code to accomplish something, then don't. So, pay attention because this will save you time later.

Global variables

We've seen a lot of controllers that query for the current user's name. It's a nice touch to add a name to the screen and make it look personalized. It's also a total waste of time because you can access that information without even performing a query. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Apex Limits, fewer queries is a good thing. The way you access it is by binding to a global variable. The platform includes a whole list of global variables that are cached and available to you without having to perform a query. These global variables are not only used in Visualforce,...