Oracle^® Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide > Customizing the Oracle BI Presentation Services User Interface >

About Skins and Styles

The Oracle BI Presentation Services Administrator can control the way the Oracle Business Intelligence interface appears to the user by creating skins and styles. The primary difference between skins and styles is that skins can be automatically assigned to a user at logon, while styles are selectable by the user at runtime to control things such as table formatting, and so on. The default skins and styles shipped with the product are located in the Oracle BI Presentation Services application resources directory (\web\app\res directory in the installation directory) in the sk_* and s_* folders.

A "skin" is assigned based on the value of the system session variable SKIN. The user can then alter some elements, such as fonts, colors, various attributes of tables and charts, and so on, by picking a "style" for request results (or a dashboard) when logged on to Oracle Business Intelligence. Skins consist of nonalterable elements, such as corporate logos or other graphics.

A "style" controls how dashboards and results are formatted for display, such as the color of text and links, the font and size of text, the borders in tables, the colors and attributes of charts, and so on. Styles consist on alterable elements, often combined into style sheets.