Show greyscale icon as red

I have an editable tabular form using APEX’s old greyscale edit link icons:

The users complained that they currently have to click each link to drill down to the detail records to find and fix any errors; they wanted the screen to indicate which detail records were already fine and which ones needed attention.

Since screen real-estate is limited here, I wanted to indicate the problems by showing a red edit link instead of the default greyscale one; since this application is using an old theme I didn’t feel like converting it to use Font Awesome (not yet, at least) and neither did I want to create a whole new image and upload it. Instead, I tried a CSS trick to convert the greyscale image to a red shade.

I used this informative post to work out what I needed: http://css-tricks.com/color-filters-can-turn-your-gray-skies-blue/

WARNING: Unfortunately this trick does NOT work in IE (tested in IE11). Blast.

Firstly, I added a column to the underlying query that determines if the error needs to be indicated or not:

select ...,
       case when {error condition}
       then 'btnerr' end as year1_err
from mytable...

I set the new column type to Hidden Column.

The link column is rendered using a Link-type column, with Link Text set to:

<img src="#IMAGE_PREFIX#e2.gif" alt="">

I changed this to:

<img src="#IMAGE_PREFIX#e2.gif" alt="" class="#YEAR1_ERR#">

What this does is if there is an error for a particular record, the class "btnerr" is added to the img tag. Rows with no error will simply have class="" which does nothing.

Now, to make the greyscale image show up as red, I need to add an SVG filter to the HTML Header in the page:

<svg style="display:none"><defs>
  <filter id="redshader">
    <feColorMatrix type="matrix"
      values="0.7 0.7 0.7 0 0
              0.2 0.2 0.2 0 0
              0.2 0.2 0.2 0 0
              0   0   0   1 0"/>
  </filter>
</defs></svg>

I made up the values for the R G B lines with some trial and error. The filter is applied to the buttons with the btnerr class with this CSS in the Inline CSS property of the page:

img.btnerr {filter:url(#redshader);}

The result is quite effective:

But, as I noted earlier, this solution does not work in IE, so that’s a big fail.

NOTE: if this application was using the Universal Theme I would simply apply a simple font color style to the icon since it would be using a font instead of an image icon.

Jeffrey Kemp 14 March 2017

APEX / apex-5.0 / CSS / tips-&-tricks /

About Jeffrey Kemp

Application Designer & Developer at Oracle specialising in Oracle APEX (Application Express), Oracle SQL and PL/SQL. Oracle ACE Alumni ♠️. Piano player, father, husband, Christian. The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.