Page Breaks

  • To force a page break
    • Add the following at the end of the page.
       <p style="page-break-before: always;">&nbsp;</p> 

Links and URLs in Emails

The software that end users use to view their email has evolved over time, and modern email software will look through the contents of an email attempting to recognize links and urls in the email and assist the user by underlining them in blue, and making them clickable to navigate to those pages. This is very handy, however, sometimes the email software gets it wrong and doesn't handle all of the possible, valid, characters in a URL.

To avoid this problem, you can use the HTML Source option of the report builder to place the HTML for a link into your report, instead of relying on the end user's email software to do it for them. Generally, this is a best practice to get consistant results as links go in all of your email reports.

I'll start by setting up my document report to look just as I'd like it, making notes about which words in my report I want to be links. For example :

Interested in building in WorkXpress?  Check out our wiki documentation.

Note: Make the words “wiki documentation” into a link.

Or

Interested in building in WorkXpress?  Click this link for our wiki documentation: http://wiki.workxpress.com.

Note: Make the wiki.workxpress.com into a link.

Now I am ready to add a link! First, I'll select the text I want to make into a link, and click the link chain button circled in red :

In the case where I know the URL I want the link to go to, I'll simply type it into the interface provided:

For links that are stored on my WorkXpress records, however, this method won't suffice. So, I'll enter some placeholder text that will be easy to find later, for instance “THISISALINK”.

Once I click insert, I will see that the typical, clickable, link styling has been applied to the text I highlighted. This will prompt the end user who gets the email to click the link to see the content.

If my link was static, and would never change, I'd be done. Since it's stored on a record in WorkXpress, I have just a few more steps. Continuing my example, each Account in my application has a custom WorkXpress Wiki link stored on it, and I want to use that link in my report.

I will choose the field in my field list that has the URL stored in it, and drop it into my report:

Then, I will highlight the text it dropped in that represents my field and I will hit Control-X to cut that field's text, placing “${Account ~> Custom Wiki Link}” in my clip board.

Finally, I will click the HTML button in the Report setup to bring up the HTML Source for my report. In this source, I will find my placeholder text “THISISALINK”. I'll highlight that text, and hit Control-V to paste my field definition text, replacing the placeholder text.

That's it! When the report runs, it will drop the actual URL from my record into the HTML for the link text and my link will be ready for clicking!

reports - html hints.txt · Last modified: 2016/09/14 18:19 (external edit)
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