Salesforce: Some Insights

Note: The main content for this blog post was shared by my friend and colleague Shriram Kabra. There are loads of blogs and articles around managing viewstate in Visualforce pages. As you would know, viewstate is primarily a serialized form of controller state between postbacks. It is very helpful to retain controller's state between client's browser and server. How viewstate works? Every time user opens a visualforce page, Salesforce executes related controller(s). As per controller logic, data is retrieved/ created within memory. This data can also be considered as controller state. If you monitor the lifecycle of Salesforce object (object of controller), it ends as soon as it responds to browser and loses its state. Technically, all subsequent requests for it are fresh page loads. In order for visualforce to retain this state between all postbacks, it needs to store this state somewhere. This is where Viewstate comes handy. While rendering visualforce page,