Getter Method Order and Visualforce Pages
I recently had a Visualforce page that was working perfectly for over two years. This thing was solid, a workhorse, one of the most used pages I have ever created. Then one day it stopped working as expected. It wasn’t a big deal really, simply an warning message wasn’t being displayed to the users. All unit tests still passed and I had made no major changes to the code. What the crazy I thought?!? The only thing I may have done at some point in the past was make minor changes to the the layout or updated the page API version.
The way I architected the page from the very first day created a ticking time bomb that would show up two years after the page was created. Enter the world of Visualforce page generation and getter method order. Before I get to the juicy good stuff I’ll briefly explain how Visualforce pages are created…at a very high level.
