How do you embed images into Acumatica Report hyperlinks? - acumatica

Question

We are trying to incorporate an image within a link on an Acumatica report.
We are very close to getting the result we need with the 2018R2 version and have a strategy for a workaround in the 2018R1 version.
The TextBox control Is the only way we have found so far that will allow for setting a hyperlink within an invoice report definition. We are able to set a background image in the Appearance/Style/BackImage property. The only way we can get the whole image to be clickable is to have text span the whole control which is fine if we can set the text font to use a transparent color. Setting the Appearance/Style/Color seems to be the property to do this however when the report is previewed the font gets overridden and displayed as the standard Hyperlink color. The behavior when the report is rendered as a PDF via Acumatica’s email delivery system the font appears white. See Images for a visual.
Transparent Text in Report Preview
Transparent Text in Rendered PDF
There looks to be an Appearance/StyleName property for the TextBox control is there an underlying CSS file that can be further manipulated to also control the LinkText properties to display the LinkText in a transparent font? If yes is there any documentation that would help with doing this.
The 2018R1 versions and prior do not render a clickable link within a PDF if the above strategy is used. Per the ticket, I opened last week on the topic the only way to get this link is to have the whole URL on a single line.
PDFs rendered from a invoice definition hosting a hyperlink will not create a clickable link
This makes it a challenge to control the placement of the image to be centered as well as having only the space within the first line as being clickable. We have solved this in a different ERP system by having multiple links overlapping a background image also using transparent font. This required us to set the Z order so that the link controls are rendered on top of the back-ground image. The Acumatica Report Designer however appears to not have the ability to control Z order. Any attempt to place a link overtop of an image does not achieve the result we are looking for. If we can get this strategy to work we will likely also use it for the 2018R2+ versions to keep things consistent.
This screenshot depicts the strategy attempted.
Are there any other strategies to meet this requirement?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For Version 2018 R2:
You can use the TextBox->Style->BackImage property to show the image and the NavigateUrl property to set the URL link. Html mode doesn't display back image but PDF mode will display it fine and the image link works:
For Version 2018 R1:
Unfortunately I didn't find a way to achieve this because I can't get the text to render transparent when it is located over an image.
There is z-order control (bring to front/send to back) in the report designer toolbar and right click context-menu. The problem here is that while the report designer supports overlapping control the report renderer doesn't. If controls are overlapping, when printing the report the overlapping controls won't get rendered on top of another like they are in the designer.
Having overlapping controls isn't really required here because we can display the image with the Textbox Style->BackImage property or with the Report->Style->BackImage.
It's also possible to make text font size bigger so you don't need multiple text box or set multiline=true with textwrap=false and repeat link on each line.
But the main issue remains rendering transparent text over an image. I couldn't find a way to do that. When there's an image under the text, the text is no longer transparent. That behavior happens for the textbox background image as well as the global report background image. This suggests to me that it might not be possible to put transparent text on top: