One of the most widely used Ajax behaviors is a partial page update, in which only a specific portion of a page is updated following some user action, rather than a reload of the entire page.
The simplest way to implement a partial page update is to use the reRender attribute on an <apex:commandLink> or <apex:commandButton> tag to identify a component that should be refreshed. When a user clicks the button or link, only the identified component and all of its child components are refreshed.
The final markup looks like this:
<apex:page standardController="Account"> <apex:pageBlock title="Hello {!$User.FirstName}!"> You are displaying contacts from the {!account.name} account. Click a contact's name to view his or her details. </apex:pageBlock> <apex:pageBlock title="Contacts"> <apex:form> <apex:dataTable value="{!account.Contacts}" var="contact" cellPadding="4" border="1"> <apex:column> <apex:commandLink rerender="detail"> {!contact.Name} <apex:param name="cid" value="{!contact.id}"/> </apex:commandLink> </apex:column> </apex:dataTable> </apex:form> </apex:pageBlock> <apex:outputPanel id="detail"> <apex:detail subject="{!$CurrentPage.parameters.cid}" relatedList="false" title="false"/> </apex:outputPanel> </apex:page>
After saving the page, click any contact and notice how the detail component displays without a complete page refresh.