The following sections provide information about how to customize the BI Publisher user interface:
Styles and skins are organized into folders that contain Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and images.
Skins and styles are typically used to customize the look and feel of the BI Publisher user interface by providing logos, color schemes, fonts, table borders, and other elements. Skins and styles can also be used to control the position and justification of various elements by including specialized style tags in the relevant style sheet file. For more information, see About Style Customizations.
To customize the look-and-feel of BI Publisher, Oracle strongly recommends that you use the custom style provided in the bicustom-template.ear file as your starting point. This custom style is a copy of the Skyros style.
For more information, see Modifying the User Interface Styles for BI Publisher.
Most of the common Skyros styles and image files, including the style sheet (master.css), are contained in the master directory. For more information about the master directory and its structure, see About Style Customizations in System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
Within the master.css style sheet, each element (or class) that is available for update is documented in the comments.
Other style sheets are also contained within the Skyros style and skin folders. You are not likely to need to update these files unless you are creating an advanced custom skin that provides styles for each detail of the user interface.
Note:
The Skyros style does not apply to Administration pages in BI Publisher.
To change the skin for BI Publisher, modify the xmlp-server-config.xml configuration file located at CATALOG_DIRECTORY/Admin/Configuration/xmlp-server-config.xml .
To change the skin to blafplus, set the THEME property as follows:
<property name="THEME" value="blafplus"/>
To change the skin back to the default skin, Skyros, set the THEME property as follows:
<property name="THEME" value="skyros"/>
Note:
The THEME property must be either "blafplus" or "skyros".
Enterprise Archive (EAR) files are archive (ZIP) files composed of a specific folder and file structure. You can create an EAR file using any ZIP tool (for example, 7-zip) and then rename the ZIP extension to EAR. Oracle provides the bicustom-template.ear file as a starting point.
The bicustom-template.ear file contains a bicustom.war file. Web Archive (WAR) files are also ZIP files composed of a specific folder and file structure. You must update the bicustom.war file within the bicustom-template.ear file to include your custom skin files. The bicustom.war file that is shipped with BI Publisher contains an example folder structure to help you get started.
When creating styles and skins for BI Publisher, you must create CSS and image files, and make them available to BI Publisher. Only the CSS defined in master.css and images defined in the master folder can be customized for BI Publisher (bundled in the bicustom.ear file.)
Update selected configuration files to create a custom style for BI Publisher when BI Publisher is not integrated with the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition.
For information on redeploying the bicustom.ear file, see Approach 1: Redeploying the "bicustom.ear" File in System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.
Update selected configuration files to create a custom style for BI Publisher integrated with Oracle BI Enterprise Edition.
Note:
The custom configuration properties override the master configuration properties; therefore the value of THEME_CUSTOM_MASTER_CSS_URL takes precedence over the value of THEME_MASTER_CSS_URL. The same rule applies for images.
When creating custom styles for BI Publisher (standalone and integrated Oracle BI Enterprise), Oracle recommends that you copy only what you want to change in the customization. Anything not copied "falls back" to the style specified in the base skin for BI Publisher, which is the Skyros theme.
For custom style sheets (css), if THEME_CUSTOM_MASTER_CSS_URL is provided, BI Publisher references those styles and ignores any others.
For custom style sheets (css), if THEME_CUSTOM_MASTER_CSS_URL is provided, BI Publisher references those styles and ignores any others. If THEME_MASTER_CSS_URL is provided, BI Publisher uses those styles. If neither are provided, BI Publisher uses the styles defined in the base skin.
BI Publisher constructs image URLs based on certain factors.
For images, if THEME_CUSTOM_MASTER_IMAGE_PATH is provided, and the requested image exists in the directory, BI Publisher uses the value of THEME_CUSTOM_MASTER_IMAGE_URL_PREFIX to construct the image URL.
If THEME_MASTER_IMAGE_PATH is provided and the requested image exists in the directory, BI Publisher uses the value of THEME_MASTER_IMAGE_URL_PREFIX to construct the image URL. If neither are provided, BI Publisher uses the images defined in the base skin.