How to implement "Cancel" functionality in a VisualForce Page

Question

I know that this is how to save a record

<apex:commandButton action="{!save}" value="Save"/>

I want a button to NOT save the current record (ie. Cancel) and navigate to the list of saved record (ie. list of objects for that object type).

Something like this...

<apex:commandButton action="{!cancel}" value="Cancel"/>

Answer 1

The list view for an object is your base URL / the 3 letter prefix for your object / o, for example:

https://na1.salesforce.com/a0C/o

So you could just create an action method that returns a Pagereference with the appropriate URL and set to redirect (pr.setRedirect(true)).

Alternatively, you could use your controller as an extension to a standard controller, and just call cancel on the standard controller:

// controller extension
public class TimeSheetExtension
{
  ApexPages.standardController m_sc = null;

  public TimeSheetExtension(ApexPages.standardController sc)
  {
    m_sc = sc;
  }

  public PageReference doCancel()
  {
    return m_sc.cancel();
  }
}

// page
<apex:commandButton action="{!doCancel}" value="Cancel"/>

Note that this doesn't necessarily take you to the list view, it'll return you to the last page you were viewing before going to the VF page.

Answer 2

You should also add the immediate tag to your Cancel button, so that the form doesn't run any validation before performing the Cancel operation.

<apex:commandButton action="{!cancel}" immediate="true" value="Cancel"/>

See http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2008/12/using-the-immediate-attribute-on-commandlinks-and-commandbuttons.html