How to change the Dashboard Header background colour

This is the first of a number of posts I'll be making about altering the look and feel of OBIEE 11g.

The official method is to create new skins, however this is quite complex if you only want to make a few tweaks, so below is the first example of workarounds to make minor changes. This requires changing original OBIEE installed files, so be sure to make a backup of any files before altering them.

 

This tutorial will show how to change the background colour of the header section of the dashboard from the default blue:              

 To another colour:

This is just a minor change to a single file – common.css.  The catch is there are four copies of this file so you need to repeat the change in all four.

The four files are located in the following directories:

OBIEE_HOME\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\web\app\res\sk_blafp\b_mozilla_4

OBIEE_HOME\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\web\app\res\sk_blafp\b_mozilla_4\rtl

OBIEE_HOME\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain\servers\bi_server1\tmp\_WL_user\analytics_11.1.1\7dezjl\war\res\sk_blafp\b_mozilla_4

OBIEE_HOME\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain\servers\bi_server1\tmp\_WL_user\analytics_11.1.1\7dezjl\war\res\sk_blafp\b_mozilla_4\rtl

Note it’s actually the common.css file in the third of these directories which immediately affects the dashboard, so test different colours and shades with this file first before altering the others.

Take a backup copy of these files before you begin.

Edit the common.css file from the first directory in a text editor.

Unfortunately these files have their entire contents on one line, so it’s a little difficult to read.

Search for the text           .HeaderContainer

The first parameter in the .HeaderContainer section is the background colour. You just need to change this to the colour you require.

#0D4988 is the default blue colour.

You can use any hex colour code. e.g. #980C13 for dark red or #008040 for green

Finally once the files are saved refresh the browser cache by using control-F5 to reload the files and the colour should change.