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Background of textitems black or pink

8 July 2005 at 14:42 CEST | In 6i to 10g upgrade, Bugs and issues, Forms, Oracle |

We’ve been strugling with a Forms issue for quite a while now. We’ve converted about 300 forms from version 6i to 10g and found out that some of them use a very dark gray (almost black) or pink color as background for some textitems. It occurs for textitems that have no background color set. This shows as “Unspecified” in Forms Builder. When you initially start the Form all looks ok, but after opening and closing some other forms in the application the items suddenly change to this darkgray or pink color.

Quite a number of our Forms originated in SQL*Forms 3.0 and were converted to 4.5, 6i and now to 10g. As it turns out these have a different color pallete than the ones that were created in 6i straight away. It looks like Oracle changed their default color palette along the way. The old forms have exactly the same palette as is now available in the CDE1.PAL file still in the Developer Suite distribution.

I filed a TAR at MetaLink and that resulted in a new bug (4383847). As it turns out, Forms deployed over the web cannot cope with different color palettes in the same session. Oracle says it has something to do with Java restriction. The answer is that you should not use custom palettes. I tried to argue that my palettes aren’t custom but just the default ones of 10 years ago, but that didn’t help.

The steps to reproduce the issue are:

Start Forms Builder v9.0.4.1.0
Edit > Preferences
Set Color Mode to Editable
Restart Forms Builder
Save the new form (module1) under the name DEFAULT.FMB
In the Forms Object Navigator create a new Canvas
Also from the navigator, create a new Block (do not use wizard)
Set block property “Database Data Block” to No
Navigate to the Items node and press the green plus three times
Select all three new items and set the Canvas property to the created canvas
Set the Item Type of the second item to “Display Item”
Set the Item Type of the third item to “Push button”
Add a When-Button-Pressed trigger to the Push Button with the code call_form('cde1');
Open the layout editor
Shift the three items around to fix the overlap
Save the Form
Copy the DEFAULT.FMB to CDE1.FMB
Open the CDE1.FMB in Forms Builder
Change the Name property of the form to CDE1
Open the layout editor for this Form
Select Edit > Import > Color Palette
Browse to ORACLE_HOME\tools\common90 and import CDE1.PAL
Change the When-Button-Pressed trigger to call_form('default');
Save the Form
Compile both forms using Forms Builder
Start DEFAULT from Forms Builder
Notice the correct colors for the text item and display item
Press the button to start the CDE1 form
Notice the CDE1 form to open with pink items
Press the button to start the DEFAULT form
Notice the DEFAULT form now also opens with the pink items
Close your webbrowser and go back to Forms Builder
Now start the CDE1 form first
Again notice that the first form shows with the correct colors
Press the button to start the DEFAULT form
Notice the DEFAULT form opens with very dark gray (almost black) items
Press the button to start the CDE1 form
Notice the CDE1 form now also opens with the dark gray items

I already mentioned this problem in a previous blog posting about our Forms conversion. That raised some questions with people, so I decided to document it in this separate blog entry. Also in my quest for a solution to this problem I found several forum questions with the same behaviour of items changing to dark gray, black or pink. Hopefully this blog entry can be helpful to these people.

The only solution provided by Oracle was to manually import the default palette into each and every form. To us, that was not a workable solution. We’re planning on running Forms 6i client/server and WebForms 10g in parallel for a couple of months. Developers continue to work in 6i only and the Forms are converted to 10g when deploying. This means our conversion process has to be repeatable and manually importing a palette is not an option. Unfortunately the JDAPI does not support changing the palette, so we couldn’t automate it that way. The solution we choose was to use the JDAPI to set the background color property of all items where it is not set. I’m setting the background color to “r100g100b100″. In effect, this is just white but with a different name. This makes it possible to recognize the items that were changed by the JDAPI. Whenever Oracle fixes the palette-bug, I might decide to change these items back to Unspecified to get really transparent items. Now I’m having white items on a non-white canvas, which isn’t what the users ask for.

If you’re struggling with white background of readonly items (both textitems without modification rights and display items), please read note 305563.1 on MetaLink. It describes a applet parameter readOnlyBackground. You can set this to TRUE to force all read-only items to use the canvas color as background. A more usefull setting is AUTO which uses the canvas color as background for readonly items that do not have a specific background set. If a readonly item does have a background color set (e.g. a current record visual attribute) then that color is used when using AUTO.

Update 29-jul-2005: Also see this blog entry of Duncan Mills which describes changing the color palette of Forms and in his introduction mentions the issue with black-on-black items.

26 Comments

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A comment I got by email from a reader:

Hi Wilfred,

I reproduced the colour problem as per your description. That is using the default.fmb and cde1.fmb that use the default and cde1 colour palettes respectively.

After that, I wondered would this still happen if I take the fmb file convert to xml and then back to fmb format. I was not able to reproduce it - that was good! I’m assuming when converting back to fmb from xml it would use the default colour palettte - since no palette information is stored in the xml file.

So, I’m asking. Did you guys try this? Is this a viable solution? Is there anything lost by doing the fmb -> xml -> fmb conversion process?

Would this also be possible with fmb -> fmt -> fmb conversion process?

Comment by Wilfred — 18 July 2005 #
We also found out that converting to XML and back resets the color palette. You can easily check by looking at the XML file itself. There is no information on color palettes in there. I’ve asked Oracle about this and this is a known bug. It will be fixed in a future version as converting to XML and back should retain all properties.

The problem we had with XML conversion is that quite a number of our forms did not convert to XML (and back) without errors. This is why I did not follow this path any further.

Converting a file to FMT and back does retain the color palette, so that’s also not a solution.

For now, we have a workaround to set all items to r100g100b100 as described in this blog posting. I’ve been in contact with Oracle and they are planning palette features in JDAPI for a future release. It’s supposed to be logged as enhancement requests 1087437 and 2252171 but they are not published on MetaLink.

Comment by Wilfred — 18 July 2005 #
Hi Wifred. From your response, I have a couple of questions.

1. Can you identify which palette(s) a Form is using? Either in Forms itself? or externally using a Unix grep?

2. Can Forms store more than 1 palette per Form?

3. What sort of errors did you receive doing the fmb->xml->fmb conversion process?

Thanks,
Armando Cabrera

Comment by Armando Cabrera — 18 July 2005 #
To identify the palette in Forms Builder, you first have to set the color mode to editable (see blog entry), restart Forms then go to the layout editor and select Edit > Layout options > Color Palette. This will show the palette and you can inspect all items in it for its name and color values.

I don’t think the actual name of the palette is stored in the Forms itself, so that’s not something you can look for. You could convert the file to FMT and grep that file. But then you would still need to know what color names to grep for. This means you will have to identfy a name of a particular palette entry that is not in the default palette.

To answer your second question: No. Forms will only store one palette per form. Each form can have its own palette, but from the response I got from Oracle support I understand you can have only one palette for your entire forms session when running on the web. This is supposed to have something to do with Java restictions.

I got a whole bunch of different errors converting to XML and back. Since we were very close to the deadline I did not investigate any further. I saw a lot of bugfixes on the XML conversion in patchset 2 (v9.0.4.2.0) so I will have another look at it after the summer. By then I will also be implementing version control and that works much better with ASCII files. So, I will then again try to convert all files to XML before checking them into Subversion. If it still doesn’t work, I’ll go with FMT files.

Comment by Wilfred — 18 July 2005 #
Also see this blog entry of Duncan Mills which describes changing the color palette of Forms and in his introduction mentions the issue with black-on-black items.

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