Identification of Landscapes Through Workspace Title Bar

Introduction

Most clients have two or more Oracle EPM landscapes. Landscape is e.g. development or production. In some cases clients have 5 landscapes: development, staging, acceptance, production and a disaster recovery environment. During certain processes it is common that administrators have Workspace open from different landscapes. In those cases it might be practical to be able to easily identify on which landscape you are working.

Since Oracle EPM 11.1.2.4 there is a black title bar containing Oracle's logo en product description, which is always visible. Ideal candidate to be abused for landscape identification. Officially Oracle doesn't support modification of Oracle EPM pages and you might break the license agreement, so consider yourself warned.

Below an example of how such a bar could look like, text and color are fully customizable:

During my instructions will alter:

Title text;
Add some left padding for cosmetic reason;

Font size of title from 8px to 10px for better visibility;

Change color of the title bar.

Although the changes are persistent, after patching Workpace the steps have to be re-done. I could not find a way around this since static content and theme file are embedded in the Workspace EAR file.

Changes can be made during run-time, however a restart of Foundation Windows services is required to activate the changes. During the instructions I will refer to %EPM_ORACLE_HOME%, which typically represents "<drive-letter>:\Oracle\Middleware\EPMSystem11R1".

Color table I personally like. From my experience it is better to avoid bright colors, they start to annoy after a while.

Color-Hex
Landscape	Color	Color-Hex
Development	Dark Green	#31b305
Staging	Dark Orange	#ff7f00
Acceptance	Dark Red	#ff1e1e
Production	Original Black	n/a

Now, let's get to work!

Using Windows Explorer navigate to %EPM_ORACLE_HOME%\products\Foundation\workspace\InstallableApps and create a backup copy of the file "workspace.ear" e.g. "workspace.ear.orig". Now create a temporary folder e.g. c:\temp and copy "workspace.ear" in to it.

Extract

Using 7-zip (which supports long file names), extract"workspace.ear" in to "workspace" and using Windows Explorer navigate into that folder. Extract the file "workspace.war" yet again in another "workspace" folder next to the "workspace.war" file. The following simplified structure should exist. The files in red we are going to edit.
|   workspace.ear
|
\---workspace
    |   deployment.xml
    |   workspace.war
    |
    +---META-INF
    |       application.xml
    |       MANIFEST.MF
    |       weblogic-application.xml
    |
    \---workspace
        |   index.jsp
        |
        \---bpmstatic
            \---thirdparty
                \---bindows
                    \---html
                        \---themes
                            \---Skyros
                                    theme.css

Change Title Text

Using Notepad++ open "index.jsp" (use the map above to navigate) and find the string
"String rstTitle = ConfigHelper.getApplicationName(application);". Important, edit only the second string! Comment this string out by prefixing this string with two forward-slashes "//". Create a copy of this string directly under the original and remove the prefixing slashes from the copied string. Replace the value of the string with the text preferred including double Quotation marks, e.g. "EPM Workspace, PRODUCTION Environment" and save the file. For production that's it.

Change Title Bar Color

However for the other environments we would like to change the color of the title bar. Using Notepad++ open "theme.css" and find the CSS class ".mastheadTitle" and change the property value for "background-color:" to the color as specified in the Color-Hex table or any other color you like. Repeat this step for CSS class ".mastheadBody". Make sure both classes have the same color hex code. Keep this file open for the next step.

Change Padding and Font Size

This step is optional, but for cosmetic reasons recommended. Find the class ".bi-label" and change the property value "font-size:" to "10px". Add the following property and value "padding-left: 10px;".

Compress

Now we are ready to pack the folder in to the "workspace.ear" using 7-Zip by navigating in to workspace/workspace and select all files and compress to "workspace.zip". Rename this file to "workspace.war" and cut it one level higher in to "workspace" and overwriting the original "workspace.war". Delete the "workspace" folder which is located in the same folder as "workspace.war". You should now have the following structure:
|   workspace.ear
|
\---workspace
    |   deployment.xml
    |   workspace.war
    |
    +---META-INF
    |       application.xml
    |       MANIFEST.MF
    |       weblogic-application.xml

Within the workspace folder. select all files and folders and compress it to "workspace.zip" and rename this file to "workspace.ear". Cut and paste this file in %EPM_ORACLE_HOME%\products\Foundation\workspace\InstallableApps and overwrite the original "workspace.ear" file.

Finally

Almost done! Restart the Windows Service "Oracle Hyperion Foundation Services - Managed Server (epmsystem1)" in order to activate the changes. In case of a high-availability environment, repeat this step for each server that has "Foundation Services" running.