In this blog post I want to share how to apply a custom theme that was built with the UI theme designer to a UI5 application that is not running in the SAP Fiori Launchpad (e.g. your local development environment).

The UI theme designer is part of the SAP Fiori Launchpad and let’s you modify existing Fiori themes. You can save and publish your themes that include custom colors and logos and consume them directly in the SAP Fiori Launchpad. Check out the guides in the official product documentation to learn more about this procedure.

In this blog post however, I want to show how to export a custom theme and apply it a UI5 application does not run in the SAP Fiori Launchpad, but maybe on a local machine during development or as a standalone application in the SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry environment (there are countless other options, of course). This means, we are not going to “publish” our custom theme, but export it and handle the files ourselves manually. This gives us great flexibility and countless deployment options.

1. Creating a Custom Theme

Let’s start by creating a custom theme in the UI theme designer. Assuming we already have admin access to a SAP Fiori Launchpad, the user menu should include the “Theme Manager”. Open it.

From the Theme Manager we can click “Launch Theme Designer” in the bottom left corner.

Inside the UI theme designer, let’s click “Create a New Theme” and select one of the available themes as a base.

To be able to distinguish our new custom theme from the base theme, we only need to change one (important) color in our custom theme. Change the “Focus Color” to any color you like (e.g. violet). We can see the preview of your changes in the preview section on the left (see the violet focus highlighting of the tile).

2. Saving and Exporting the Custom Theme

Before we can export our theme, we first have to save it. Click on “Theme” and “Save” in the top left corner.

We can now export our theme by clicking on “Theme” and then “Export” in the top left corner.

In the Export window, it is important that we expand the “Optional Settings” and include the “Source Files + CSS Resources“, as this is what we will need for our UI5 application that runs locally. We can uncheck the Unified Rendering option, which is not needed in our case.

After clicking “Export”, a .zip file will be downloaded. Unzip this file and open the directory. It should look like the directory in the screenshot below.

3. Adding the Custom Theme to the UI5 Application

We can now move the “UI5” folder of the download into our UI5 application (next to the index.html file). The UI5 application in the image below was generated with the easy-ui5 generator, but it works with any UI5 based application.

It makes sense to now rename the “UI5” directory to give it a little more meaning. Let’s rename it to “themes”.

The final change we have to make is to adjust the theme in the UI5 bootstrapping in the index.html file:

• First, we have to set data-sap-ui-theme=”custom_quartzdark”  (we specified this name during the export in step 2).
• Second, we also have to set data-sap-ui-theme-roots='{“custom_quartzdark” : “themes/”}’ to make the framework aware of a different than usual location for the theme.

You can learn more about setting themes in the UI5 documentation.

data-sap-ui-theme-roots='{"custom_quartzdark" : "themes/"}'
data-sap-ui-theme="custom_quartzdark"

We can now start our UI5 application locally and check out our custom theme.

4. Further Ideas

From this point on there are endless possibilities in regards to where you can store the “themes” directory. You could for example build another application which simply serves the directory and deploy it to Cloud Foundry. In this case you would have to provide the full URL to the “themes” directory (e.g. http://my.new.webapp/themes) in the data-sap-ui-theme-roots attribute. You could then update this second application and therefore change the theme of the UI5 application, without actually touching it.

Please let me know in case you have further questions or feedback.

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