The title is somewhat dramatic and probably not relevant to many people however for me and a client that I work with it proved to be a disaster. This is not the first time that Blackbaud has changed the API and it certainly won’t be the last but this was annoying. So what am I referring to?

My client recently upgraded from version 7.61 to 7.82. I am not sure when this change came in but the action category was changed from “E-mail” to “Email”. These are not dynamic code table entries but rather static values. A third party integration application sent the value “E-mail” for action category and of course what happens when RE was upgraded? The application produced an exception (like all good programs however it was an exception to the log file and not a catastrophic near blue screen of death or anything on that scale). However that kind of change was unnecessary. Clearly “Email” is probably in more popular use compared to “E-Mail” but the back-end should have coped with the changed. They should have allowed for legacy applications still feeding the value “E-Mail”

Anyway rant over…