How to use Font Awesome Icon in Placeholder

One good way to make items more self explanatory is to use icons on their placeholders like the search item below

Create a css class to allow icon to be recognized

.placeholder {

   font-family: FontAwesome, "Open Sans", Verdana, sans-serif;

}

and then set the created class to the item

Do not use the "Value Placeholder" to include the icon, if you do this, the code will be transformed into text. Search for the icon unicode at this link and then set it to the custom attributes field as the picture below.

placeholder=''

and then refresh the page.

    Oracle APEX 5.0 comes with FontAwesome version 4.2.0 on Universal Theme. If you want to upgrade for the last version to add some icons do the steps as follows

//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.6.3/css/font-awesome.min.css

1. In your Application go to Shared Components – Themes
2. Click on Universal Theme – 42 to edit it
3. Go to the Icons region
4. Set "Custom Library File URLs" to //maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/css/font-awesome.min.css 
5. Set "Custom Prefix Class" to fa
6. Click Apply Changes