1. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
Oracle Forms Modernisation
Case Study | ILIAS Solutions
Business Context
ILIAS Solutions is a technology company that provides a COTS Defense
Logistics Information System (DLIS) based on Oracle technology.
Development started in 1994 with Oracle Forms version 2.3 and Oracle
Database version 6.0. The company went through almost all upgrades
and today release 20 uses Oracle 11g release 2 for both Forms and
Database.
The ILIAS Enterprise Solution (ES) has about 700 forms and an install
base of several thousands of users in different national and
international defense organizations, including parts of NATO.
When demonstrating the ILIAS ES to prospective customers, all of them
were impressed by the capabilities of the system, but many were
turned off by the old-fashioned look and feel of the Oracle Forms user
interface. The user experience could not live up to the expectations of
the modern day computer user. Time had come to change.
With 20 years of know-how built in to the system, a software
development team of Oracle Forms experts, and a user community of
several thousands of users, a switch to a different technology would
cause a significant amount of change. Change with which military
organizations don’t deal well.
Apart from that, Oracle Forms still beats many other technologies in
terms of speed of development.
All things considered and being the Oracle Forms experts we are, we
decided to “see how far we could push this Forms thing to make it look
good”.
The results are satisfied customers and more enthusiastic prospects.
This document provides an overview of the changes we have made.
“This looks like pretty old technology”

2. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
Before & After…
Before we dive into the details, let’s have a look at what a typical form looked like before and after
the facelift…
After… Before…
The following sections provide a more detailed description on the components we used and adjusted
to improve the user interface and user experience.

3. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
The Portal
Top Banner
The top banner is a component written in HTML; everything below is
Oracle Forms. You could say this became our alternative to the Oracle
Forms Menu. We will not elaborate further on this top banner. The
only thing we can mention is that it communicates with Oracle Forms
and vice-versa using JavaScript.
The Forms Layout
Forms Toolbar
Just below the Top Banner, you see the Oracle Forms Toolbar. We use
buttons without bevel loading gif images at runtime. Nothing special so
far.

4. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
Content Canvas
The main area is filled with a content canvas that has a tab page canvas
on top of it. As you can see we styled the tab pages to have a flat look
as well. The boxes inside are frames containing text items.
Message Bar
At the bottom of the page we restyled the Oracle Forms status bar. We
kept the record item and hint text area.
At the right side we added our magnifier. The magnifier allows
minifying and magnifying an Oracle Forms screen. This option is
transparent for the developer. On the internet we found poor
alternatives; either the solutions could not minify properly or they had
a severe impact towards development (post generation etc.). Today we
are able to scale the screen taking into account the resolution of the
client computer.

5. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
The Applet
We’ve extended the applet code to change the default behaviour of a number of Oracle Forms
features.
Notifications
We extended the applet code to raise the notifications at the bottom
right side of the screen, similar to Microsoft Outlook.
We don’t use the message bar or forms alert. Notifications are stacked
and fade away after 10 seconds.

6. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
Current field indication
The current field is marked with a blue border.
List of Values
Lists of values are indicates with a tiny symbol inside the field, which
only appears when the item can be changed.

7. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
Bottom toolbar
Our lists of values are implemented as Oracle Forms screens. They have
bottom toolbars. Natively Oracle Forms does not support bottom or
right hand side toolbars.
Hide window bar in maximized mode
In the example above you notice that form 1 has no window bar while
form 2 does have one. This fits the look and feel better.

8. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
Checkboxes, Radio Buttons and Action Buttons
We’ve redrawn the checkboxes, radio buttons and action button
elements to have a flat look.
Colors
We’ve adjusted the color pallet (standard feature of Oracle Forms) and
we’ve adjusted the frame component so that it’s background and
border color can be changed at runtime (not a standard feature).

9. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
More Screens
We’ve included a web browser PJC that (in this example) displays a
HighChart1
component.
1
www.highcharts.com

10. Chris Schockaert & Luc Gyselinck © ILIAS Solutions
About ILIAS Solutions
ILIAS Solutions specialises in defence logistics information management solutions (DLIS) with a twist. Our
software platform focuses on the management of operational capabilities and the optimisation of
operational readiness of the resources (materiel, people and budget) required for those operations.
ILIAS Solutions, an Oracle Gold Partner for many years.
For more information, please visit www.ilias-solutions.com.