Redwood theme backgrounds revealed

I am a big fan of Redwood theme from the first minute it was released for the APEX Builder. Luckily for us, the developers and users, it can be now used as an application theme too. The new version of APEX (21.1) even gives the ability to modify it (a little) through the Theme Roller. As you can see, options available are far less than the ones provided for Vita styles for example.

No mater if you use it for your application or not, you can take advantage of the 23 different backround patterns that APEX has integrated. I haven’t found a place where they are listed, so I just went through each of them using the Dev toolbar in my browser. They are all part of the CDN resources, APEX started providing some years ago (and renewing with every release). More details about that can be found in this blog post from Joel Kallman – Announcing Oracle APEX Static Resources on Content Delivery Network.

In the different versions, the links to those CDN files differ a little, but they look like this in general:

• https://static.oracle.com/cdn/apex/20.2.0.00.20/themes/theme_42/1.6/images/rw/textures/texture-1.png
• https://static.oracle.com/cdn/apex/21.1.0/themes/theme_42/1.6/images/rw/textures/texture-1.png
• … and so on

That’s an important note: The older CDN libraries are probably inactive or the file structure is different. So remember to always update the path of your files or CDN libraries when APEX is upgraded. Connor McDonald has a great blog post on why you should update the CDN path in time – APEX upgrade – don’t forget your CDN

To help out other enthusiasts, who would like to use the Redwood theme, I have created an APEX demo page, where you can quickly check all the background textures, pick the one you like and see a sample CSS style implementation, together with the actual URL of each texture.