Oracle Business Intelligence 12c comes with built-in styles which create a specific look for your users. The default style includes an Oracle logo in the top-left, a gray border, black words, blue page titles, and a white page background. This style is called Alta. There are several styles you can choose from, each with their own set of colors, spacing, and region shapes. Each dashboard can use a different style which you can set yourself at any time.

If none of the available styles suit your company or project, then the good news is that you can create your own styles and load them into the BI Server. You can also change the default styles for all dashboards if you need to.

This chapter shows you how to change styles, and how to create and implement a new style.

Throughout the Oracle BI system, users are presented with words and messages that guide them. An example would be the sign out message, which is fairly obvious what it does! But other messages may need further explanation, such as the No results default message. The good news is that messages can be in the default language of your users, so English speakers see English messages, but your Spanish users see Spanish messages.

This chapter will also cover how to change messages throughout the system.

What's the idea?

Let's first qualify what it means to customize the style of the Oracle BI dashboard. There are several approaches to modifying the look, feel, and overall integration associated with the Oracle BI dashboard. This could include anything from adding a custom button or link, appending a third-party widget, changing the logo, or changing the color scheme present in the out-of-the-box Oracle BI product. Now that the definition is out of the way, the question is: what do the customization requirements seek to accomplish? Do the customizations seek to modify form, function, or both?

The most common directive of customizing a dashboard has to do with modifying the color scheme seen in the Oracle BI portal. This is referred to as branding. Branding is really a marketing term but it is used ubiquitously for this scenario as it applies to web-based applications. One of the main ideas behind branding the Oracle BI portal is to increase user adoption among the user base. Internally, users are much more likely to begin using Oracle BI and stay within the tool if it doesn't seem foreign to their current corporate tools. Think about it this way; if Sally Joe, in finance, navigated from her company's Intranet, which clearly displays the company logo, colors, and so on, using a hyperlink on the main page, to an Oracle BI dashboard in order to view a profit and loss report, the segue could potentially appear seamless. That is, Sally Joe would see the requested data in the dashboard and still appear to be within her company Intranet instead of a bland (although kind of good looking), out-of-the-box application that looks like some new tool she has to learn.

This chapter focuses mainly on that branding of Oracle BI 12c dashboards using styles.

Multiple skins and styles in one environment

Oracle BI can house several customized looks or branding profiles. This can be dynamically set by associating a particular style with a particular user, group, or application role. Let's say Sally Joe in the Finance department logs in to the Oracle BI portal. Sally may be presented with a blue and white color scheme with the corporate logo showing in the portal whereas her constituent, Erich in the European office, may log in to the Oracle BI portal and be presented with a brown and gold color scheme showing the flag of Germany as the logo. This dynamic shifting of branding to specific end users can be achieved by relating a specific style to a specific user, group, or application role. It could also be established by setting a default style for all users and having only specified users, groups, and roles associated with a different perspective.

Another nuance is that several aspects of branding can be localized. That is to say that depending on the locale or location from which an end user has associated themselves (usually determined by the browser and language settings of the workstation being used), a different appearance or branding may be applied and rendered during their interaction within the Oracle BI portal. This can be seen ubiquitously in the exercise steps in the Custom messages section in this chapter.

Hands-on - go time!

The remainder of this chapter provides a systematic guide on implementing what is referred to as basic branding. The goal of the exercise is to take an out-of-the-box Oracle BI dashboard and transform the default style to contain the logo and colors of Company XYZ. Each step builds upon the one before it, so following the steps in order will be crucial to the end result. It is recommended to leverage the operating system's default text editor when making changes to base files provided by the Oracle BI platform filesystem; in our case, we are using Notepad++.

In the first exercise, we will look at how we can change a dashboard to use one of the existing styles that Oracle provides out-of-the-box.

Changing styles

Before we create our style, lets investigate the existing available styles:

1. Log into OBIEE 12c.
2. Open our Dashboard One.
3. Select the Edit Dashboard icon.
4. Select Dashboard Properties...:
   

5. Change the Style to blafp (stands for BI look and feel):
   

6. Click on OK.
7. Save the dashboard.
8. Click on Run.

You now see a significantly different looking dashboard page than when you started:

Tip

Note the different style of page tab, the blue background, and the little icons on the menu items.