By default the OBI colour palette may not be to everyone’s taste or corporate branding. Using the custom messages functionality of OBI to customise it we can change the colours in this palette!

The custom message that we need to customise is {Oracle_Home}/bifoundation/web/msgdb/messages/commonuitemplates.xml so we’ll copy that to our custom messages directory for editing.

The message we’re interested in is named “kuiColorSelectorColors” <WebMessage name="kuiColorSelectorColors" translate="false"> so the easiest way is to search the file for that and delete out the other messages.

Within the kuiColorSelectorColors message we see three parameters, two for the dimensions of the palette: knFormatColorsRows = 6; knFormatColorsCols = 8;

So by default the palette is 6 rows by 8 columns for a total of 48 colours. We can change this to increase or reduce the number of colours the palette will hold.

The third parameter is an array definition of the colour values in their hexadecimal format: kaFormatColors = new Array(“#CC99CC”,…);

Obviously we need to define the right number of colours for the volume of our palette (I’ve not tested what happens if we define too many or too few colours here). Interestingly the palette will fill from this array starting with the bottom left corner, filling to the right and upwards one row at a time – not from the top as you may expect.