Customize/Personalize Oracle APEX Workspace Environment

When you have multiple Oracle APEX environments, e.g., development, test, UAT and production, and for multiple groups, one of the confusing things is that sometimes developers are lost on which environment they’re working on. Most of technically proficient developers can make a distinction easily from the URLs they’re currently using. However, most of less technically proficient (e.g., business users) sometimes cannot.

A quick and simple solution here is to make a visual distinction on the APEX workspace pages especially on the logo area. Instead of using plain vanilla logo images, they are replaced with more distinct and informative images.

This is the default APEX workspace logon page.

This is a sample of the personalized workspace logon page with a company logo and it is showing that this is the development environment.

This is the main workspace page after logon showing the default logo image.

You can change it to be like this.

With just this minor change, our users feel more comfortable knowing that they’re working the right environment.

How to change it?

With a quick investigation, you can easily find the paths of those image files as follows:

Workspace logon page:

Image path: /i/apex/builder/apex-logo-white.gif
Image size: 300px x 30px
Transparent background

Image path:/i/apex/builder/apex-db-apps.png
Image size: 240px x 200px
Transparent background

Workspace main page after logon:
Image path: /i/htmldb/apex_logo.gif
Image size: 300px x 30px
White background

• Use Photoshop or any image editing tools to recreate those image files.
• Copy and replace those image files on the web server. Please make the backup of those files before replacing them.

Note that this approach will NOT work if you’re using a shared web server for multiple APEX database environments because they’re using the same image files.

Update: Using ApexLib script in the login message (under Manage Instance) as mentioned by Peter in the comment section is another solution for customization. I like this approach as not only you can customize the logo, but you can also change the description text on the workspace logon page. In addition, since the change is on the APEX instance itself, it can definitely be used on a shared web server.