Visualforce-specific features and guidance
Table of Contents

Visualforce consists of a tag-based markup language that gives developers way to build applications and customize the Salesforce user interface.

Language Info for Salesforce Visualforce
  • Since PMD 5.6.0
  • Implementation: VfLanguageModule
  • Id: visualforce
  • PMD: ✔️
  • CPD: ✔️

Language Properties

See Visualforce language properties

Type resolution

Since PMD 6.30.0 support for type resolution has been added.

The Visualforce AST now can resolve the data type of Visualforce expressions that reference Apex Controller properties and Custom Object fields. This feature improves the precision of existing rules, like VfUnescapeEl.

This can be configured using two language properties, which can be set as environment variables:

  • PMD_VISUALFORCE_APEX_DIRECTORIES: Comma separated list of directories for Apex classes. Absolute or relative to the Visualforce directory. Default is ../classes. Specifying an empty string will disable data type resolution for Apex Controller properties.

  • PMD_VISUALFORCE_OBJECTS_DIRECTORIES: Comma separated list of directories for Custom Objects. Absolute or relative to the Visualforce directory. Default is ../objects. Specifying an empty string will disable data type resolution for Custom Object fields.

Sample usage

PMD_VISUALFORCE_APEXDIRECTORIES=../classes \
PMD_VISUALFORCE_OBJECTSDIRECTORIES=../objects \
pmd check -d $GITHUB_WORKSPACE/force-app/main/default/pages \
    -R category/visualforce/security.xml/VfUnescapeEl -f text

If you run with debug logging turned on, you might see log messages like this:

Okt. 14, 2021 11:30:44 AM net.sourceforge.pmd.lang.visualforce.VfExpressionTypeVisitor visit
FINE: Unable to determine type for: Account.NotFoundField__c

This means, that type resolution didn’t work. Maybe the provided directories are missing or do not contain the needed data.

Tags: languages PmdCapableLanguage CpdCapableLanguage