What is AJAX typically used for in Salesforce Visualforce pages?

Hi Suniti,

Visualforce has inbuilt support for the AJAX. using the attribute “rerender” we can specify that where the response should be rendered.

Lets have an example to demonstrate that how simple AJAX works in visualforce.

public class AjaxDemo {

private String currTime;
public String getCurrTime()
{
return currTime;
}
public void setCurrTime()
{
currTime = System.now().format('EEEE, MMMM d, yyyy - hh:mm:ss');
}
}

On the basis of above Apex class lets create Visualforce page with below code.

<apex:page Controller="AjaxDemo">
<apex:pageBlock Title="Ajax Sample">
Hello <b> {!$User.FirstName}</b>.
<apex:form >
<br /><br />
<apex:commandbutton action="{!setCurrTime}" rerender="ajaxresult" value="Display Current Time" /></apex:form>
</apex:pageBlock><apex:pageBlock title="AjaxData">
<apex:outputPanel id="ajaxresult" layout="block">
Result: {!CurrTime}
</apex:outputPanel>
</apex:pageBlock>

</apex:page>

Hi,

AJAX is primarily used for partial page updates in Visualforce.  In s-controls, the AJAX toolkit was the soap (XML over HTTP) client that gave you access to the force.com Web Services API.

Hope this helps.