how to create a custom login page in salesforce com

Question

is it possible to create a custom login page in salesforce.com? if so can anyone provide help to create the page and the validations part?

Answer 1

Here are a few things to consider:

Is it possible that this page will be hosted on your site?

Is this going to be used by a number of different salesforce organisations?

To obtain a session id, one option is to use the login() API call. If the login fails, you'll be able to detect it and notify the user appropriately.

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After that, the user must be redirected to the "frontdoor.jsp" page, which has the following format:

• https://[host].salesforce.com/secur/frontdoor.jsp?sid=[session_id]&retURL=[start_page]

Where:

• [host] - varies by organization. Some that I've seen are na1, na2, .... If you are only building this for 1 organization, you could hard-code this value. If you are building the for multiple organizations, you could parse it from the serverUrl property of the returned LoginResult.
• [session_id] - get this from the returned LoginResult
• [start_page] - this is optional but can be used to "deep link" a user to a page after they've logged in.

Edit: 2014-08-25

Salesforce now officially supports the frontdoor.jsp method of login described in this answer (link). In addition, session_ID tokens can be obtained from any of the following sources:

1. The access_token from an OAuth authentication.Note that one of the scopes specified when you create a Connected App must be web or full.
2. The LoginResult returned from a SOAP API login() call
3. The Apex UserInfo.getSessionId()