The button alpha channel doesn’t seem to work? Specifically, if i enable ‘fill area’ and set the background color to an alpha value of anything greater than 0, it will be totally opaque. I know you can change it in the property expression, but im trying to make it different colors (and opacity) if the mouse focus is on it. Any ideas?
This is Vision? (Add the tag to your question.)
What Ignition version in particular?
This is version 8.1.11
I would upgrade, and if things still aren’t working to your satisfaction, there’s some workarounds described in this thread: Upgrade version makes buttons dissapear (possible bug?) - #11 by JFer
Thanks, I did upgrade to 8.1.19, no change.
I also added the recommended ‘blend mode alpha’ to a client startup script, but the effect is the same. Anything higher than 0 in the alpha channel automatically makes the buttons totally opaque. 
Oh, wait. Sorry, I was misunderstanding your question/concern.
This is sort of a fundamental limitation of Java Swing, Vision’s underlying GUI system. When you set ‘Fill Area’ to true, you’re telling Swing that the component is opaque, which Swing takes to mean it can optimize rendering by simply not rendering anything below the component.
Our ‘look and feel’ takes that painting optimization even further.
For what you’re trying to do, I would say the easiest path forward would be to attach mouse event hooks to a label component (which will be properly transparent: 
) and use that instead of a button.