Upgrading the Universal Theme

Back when APEX 5.0 was released, these forward thinkers at the development team installed a feature to verify your Universal Theme against the one defined in the repository.

There hasn't really been anything to verify against, until now.

There are a number of changes to the Universal Theme, and one way to explore these changes is to check out what's reported under the Verify button in the Theme definition.

Though unfortunately on apex.oracle.com I'm still getting the same error
ORA-20001: Unable to subscribe to report template.
ORA-00040: active time limit exceeded - call aborted

Errors aside, this facility all planned, of course, to minimise the impact theme upgrades have caused in the history of APEX. And no doubt used internally while they were developing UT in the first place.

As Patrick Wolf points out in this forum post, some features aren't borne out of the IDE upgrade alone, but are found with the theme upgrade. This includes RTL functionality.

So some thoughts that come out of reviewing the comparison:

• A couple of new default styles, to go along with Slate. Nice.
• Two new region templates to explore - Content Block and Blank with Attributes (No Grid)
• Every other template has been touched in some way. It would be nice to see a diff of the updates.

If your Universal Theme is still locked, you just refresh your theme definition and your application should continue to work wonderfully.

Take care if you have any customisations or extensions, regression test as necessary. We've tried to minimise ours so it will be interesting to explore when 5.1 becomes generally available.

If you want to learn more about the features of the Universal Theme, check out the sample application, which also got a wicked upgrade, always available at
apex.oracle.com/ut
There are some awesome tools in the reference section alone.