APEX custom Theme Style performance

When you create an application in Oracle Application Express (APEX) using the Universal Theme, the application comes with a few default "Theme Styles" which are essentially various stylesheets that you can switch between to go from the default blue (called "Vita") to, for example, the dark grey style (called "Vita - Slate").

You can use the Theme Roller in Oracle Application Express (APEX) to customize the colors and other settings, and by saving these you create your own Theme Styles. In this video, Shakeeb from the Oracle APEX team demonstrates how to use the Theme Roller, and he also briefly mentions that the generated stylesheet for custom theme styles can be placed into the filesystem for better performance.

I recorded a video myself to discuss the details of how custom Theme Styles affect the performance of your APEX application, and how you can move the Theme Style generated stylesheets to a web server to maximize performance and minimize bandwidth consumption:

Another issue that I did not mention in the video is that when you pick an icon for your application, APEX creates an app-icon.svg file (for the logo itself) and app-icon.css (that references the svg file), and places both those files in your Static Application Files.

Now since these files (and all other Static Application Files) are stored in the database, they require a database hit to retrieve, instead of fetching them from (and caching them on) the web server filesystem.

So if you want to maximize performance, I suggest that you remove the reference to the logo CSS file from your application (and delete the files from the Static Application Files).

If you really want that logo icon, you could of course place the .svg and .css files on the web server and reference them from there instead.

Apex 5 right side column

The new Universal Theme in Apex 5 includes a nice "right side column" feature that adds a sliding menu on the right side of the page, where you can place additional content, such as (for example) an audit trail, actions/links, comments, whatever.

Let me show you with a picture:

To add this to your page, simply change the page template to "Right Side Column", and note that a "Right Column" template position appears in the grid layout pane:

You can then place whatever you want in this template position (any region, with buttons and items as usual). Here, I have placed two different regions on top of each other:

That's all there is to it. Again, Apex 5 with the Universal Theme makes this very easy.

By the way, have you checked out the Universal Theme sample application? You can install it into your own workspace from the Packaged Applications gallery, and it is also available online at https://apex.oracle.com/ut

Using this application you can browse the various templates and template options built into the Universal Theme. For example, it showcases the "Right Side Column" template with thumbnails and sample pages, and also tells you how to implement it.