Hijack an APEX template. Use CSS to get what you want.

In recent postings, I talk about making all new templates for your APEX apps. What about something in the middle of a total rewrite of a template and the stock templates? Lets take a look at this. To start you are going to need some tools.

1. Firebug for firefox, found at getfirebug.com
2. A CSS Reference. CSSEdit for the mac, Topstyle for the PC or the free tutorial at W3Schools.

Next, we need an APEX app. Lets use the sample app, even better, lets start with the sample app login page. Start up firefox with firebug installed and nav to that login page. On the bottom of firefox, turn firebug on by clicking the little bug.

Next in the firebug tool bar, click the inspect icon.

Now, mouse over the login box. You will see it border in blue. Now click it. You will see html in your firebug window centered around the td tag with the class t12Body.

Look just above it and find the t12Login class assigned to a table. Click the table element.

In the firebug toolbar, look to the right. You will see the attributes for the t12Login class.

 

Nothing too too complex, just a border and some dimensions. Lets liven it up a bit. Double click directly under the width element. A empty text field will appear. Lets change the background color. Start typing background and watch firebug auto fill it for you.

Hit the tab key and enter #8599B8 in the field. The background of the login box should have changed from white to blue.

Use your CSS editor and experiment with all the CSS elements you can use.

Reload the page. Uh oh...your background is back to normal. Firebug does not write these changes to the base CSS file.

To make these changed permanent, we need to go behind the page into the page editor. Once there go to the page attributes -> HTML Header. We need to override, or hijack the default CSS settings. Start by putting a style tag in the header followed by closing that style tag.

<style>

</style>

Now lets get our customizations in here. Between the style tags, put the following:

.t12Login {

     background:#8599B8;

}

You can also add any of your own style elements here as well. Apply the changes and reload the page. You will now see your new customized styles on the page.

The Daemon

I just finished listening/reading the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez. You can pick up the book or the audiobook. I HIGHLY recommend this book for people whom enjoy action/mystery/tech stories. The premise is that a genius game developer gets brain cancer and dies, but leaves a series of daemons running on computers around the world, whom are programmed for world domination. This book is very tech heavy and is great to hear a story using the terms and phrases we deal with day to day. Also would make a kickin movie. Pick it up and give it a read/listen.

Jet Dog

One of my best models for posing is one of our dogs, Jet. What is interesting with this picture is it was dont with an old olympus manual focus lens. It was great to try my hand at the "old" ways, no auto focus we all know, love and sometimes depend too much on.

The T Pasture

Here is a shot of a pasture just off of route 1A in Lynne (MA). Just beyond this field is the T.

The T Pasture

Lets Liven This Up A Bit....

So my posting frequency has been once a week...well I have some other stuff on other sites to I might as well mix it up a bit...so ill have not only APEX/Oracle related stuff but I'm thinking ill move some of my totally amateur photography over here as well..my Picture a day stuff (though I haven't been all that faithful to the 'a day' part).