OraTransplant

Use color scheme colors in Oracle Forms

13 June 2005 at 21:33 CEST | In Features and tips, Forms, Oracle |

I just found out how to set Color properties for objects in Oracle Forms that refer to the colors of the currently used ColorScheme.

The colorScheme is something you can set in the webforms.cfg or set in the URL calling Oracle Forms. There are 7 different documented colorSchemes available in Oracle Forms and one undocumented one (blaf). But what if you give your user the freedom to select their own colorScheme. What color would you then use for items in your Forms? Wouldn’t it be nice if you can just refer to the colors from the colorScheme? Well you can!

We’re having some issues with different color palettes in Oracle Forms. It messes up the background color of items which have no background color set. I’m working on that with Oracle Support. When searching for more information on MetaLink I stumbled across one document that refers to some undocumented colors.

It appears that the undocumented colors “OLAFVeryLight”, “OLAFLight”, “OLAFDark” and “OLAFVeryDark” exist. You cannot select them from a list in Oracle Forms, but you can just type them in the properties palette. This must be a very unknown feature. None of these colors give any hit on Google and only 4 forum entries on MetaLink refer to these colors.

Works like a charm although I bet it is not officially supported by Oracle. Also, you never know if they will keep this feature in a future version or perhaps officially document it.

Update: A binary search over all files of Oracle Forms revealed that the colors “automatic”, “OLAF0″, “OLAF1″, “OLAF2″, “OLAF3″ and “OLAF4″ are also supported. Do mind that all these names are case sensitive.