Forms Personalization: How To Add a New Icon to the Toolbar

I have been tinkering with Forms Personalization over the past week for some customer design and have found the documentation to be challenging when it comes down to the details. I’ve learned a couple cool things during this process that I thought I would post here as I was unable to find it in the documentation and hopefully it can be of benefit to others.

The documentation I’ve been using has been a variety of PDF’s, powerpoints, viewlets, forum posts, etc… It appears that the main documentation from Oracle can be found on My Oracle Support at note 279034.1 for 11i and 395117.1 for R12. If anyone knows of any other official documentation, please let me know, perhaps I just missed it?

My goal for using forms personalization was to create a new menu item and then have it launch a form with dynamic parameters. Ideally I would also like a new icon on the toolbar as well.

First order of business, create the new menu item. Easy enough, there are examples everywhere of how to do this. In my case I just needed to create a Menu Action on a WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE condition.

When creating the Menu Action you are prompted for an Icon Name.

The documentation for this field is as follows:

Specify an optional icon name that you want added to the Toolbar to achieve the same functionality as in the special pulldown menu entry.

OK… so… What are valid values for this field? What format should the icon be? Are there specific dimensions? Where do I put it?

Through some trial and error and a couple posts on the Oracle Forums, I’ve found the following to be true.

Format of icon: gif
Specific Dimensions: 18×18 pixels (based on the size of existing icons)
Where to put file: $OA_JAVA/oracle/apps/media
Valid entry for field: Just the filename WITHOUT the extension.

So in the end, once you have the icon (xxbrent.gif) in the correct format (gif 18×18 pixels) and on the file system ($OA_JAVA/oracle/apps/media), your form should look like this:

Note that in order for the icon to show up, I had to exit from Oracle Forms completely and then go back in.

I’ll address some interesting things I found with function parameters in an upcoming post.