Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud, Third Edition

Action as JavaScript Function

The action component actionFunction allows you to call an Apex method in the controller as a JavaScript function. This decouples the user interface representation of the action from the action itself. You’ve already experienced action components that require a user to click a link or button to trigger a controller action. With actionFunction, you can call an action from anywhere in your page, including custom JavaScript code.

To use the actionFunction component, minimally specify an action to invoke in the action attribute, a JavaScript function name in the name attribute, and enclose it in a form component. Optionally, you can define arguments on the function by nesting param components inside the actionFunction ...