Change the default user interface style of OBIEE

Starting from OBIEE 11.1.1.7 you can do more and more with customising the OBIEE GUI. By default the OBIEE installation will apply the FusionFx style to the GUI resulting in something similar as can be seen above. FusionFx however does contain a lot of good old blafp styles. Personally I don't really like that default GUI. To have a more modern look and feel of OBIEE there are a number of options which I'll outline in this and future posts. 

The OBIEE GUI is based on a bunch of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which are packed in a kind of style packages. Oracle calls them Styles and Skins.

Within your installation a number of style packages are shipped for example Alta, Fuse and Skyros. In order to change the default style package for OBIEE we need to change the config file of the BI Presentation Services which is the instanceconfig.xml. Normally you can find this config file within your instance folder of the installation ie. BIINSTANCE/config/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1/instanceconfig.xml.

Edit this file and add the below xml tags within your ServerInstance element to change the complete GUI to for example Skyros. 

<UI>

<DefaultStyle>Skyros</DefaultStyle>

<DefaultSkin>Skyros</DefaultSkin>

</UI> 

When you have saved the instanceconfig.xml config file restart your BI Presentation Services with Enterprise Manager or the command line.

If the presentation services are not correctly starting you might have made a typo, or didn't close tags correctly when editing instanceconfig.xml. When the services are running again you can see the new style applied directly to your OBIEE installation.

In future posts I'll talk about this more including creating your very own tailored style and skin.

Have fun!