Thank you to all of you who came along to my presentation at the Blackbaud European Conference. If you are coming to this site because of the conference then welcome.
As promised here is my presentation to download. Feel free to explore this blog or browse through the plugins on zeidman.info.
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There was a post on Blackbus recently where a Raiser’s Edge user was having trouble mapping the output of a third party system to RE. The other system had the constituent system id and did not have the import id or the constituent ids so importing the data directly into RE was proving to be a problem. It would also be difficult to do any kind of lookup natively in RE unless it was done manually through a query.
I suggested that this was a straight forward solution if you were to write a plugin. In fact I felt that it was so straight forward that I would just write it. So here it is a new plugin that takes a system constituent id and outputs the constituent and import ids appending them to a copy of the input file.
Continue reading Lookup by constituent system id – a new free plugin
I am really looking forward to the Blackbaud European Conference. Apart from the fact that I will be speaking there it will be great to meet a lot of the people whose posts I have read on the Blackbaud forums and on Blackbus.
If you are going to be there then come along to my session: The Raiser’s Edge Decoded – A first look at the Raiser’s Edge API. This will be a non-technical look at what can be done with the API. I will be looking at real live examples of how the API can be used to improve your organisations efficiency. The session is at 13.30 on Monday 20th October. I shall be at the conference both days and available to answer any questions you may have
One of the good things about the CCodeTablesServer class is the ability to fill a combo with code table entries. For example if I have a custom form and want to be able to allow the user to select say, a title, I can simply call the CCodeTablesServer class method LoadCombo and my combo is filled up with titles. Well it is if I am using a COM environment such as VB6. But what do I do if I am using .NET? Continue reading Filling a .NET dropdown with code table entries
I have on several occasions expressed my delight about the arrival of the Batch API. I am still enthusiastic but somewhat war weary having spent this passed week trying to solve problems that have appeared. Clearly the Batch API was not rigorously tested before it was released as otherwise the sort of errors I am getting would not have appeared. In case you have been struggling too or in case you thinking about using this functionality here is what I have been up against.
Continue reading Battling on with the Batch API
One issue I had when I first started was how do I remove a child object from a collection. For example if I want to remove one constituent code from a constituent I need to loop through them, find the one I want to remove and remove it. My fear though was that if I simply remove it whilst looping won’t I mess up the collection? This can happen in some classes.
In my endeavour of documenting the undocumented I would like to present this little nugget of an unwritten feature. I wanted to filter a constituent’s individual relationship based on a reciprocal type and on the to date not being populated i.e. the relationship was still valid. I’ll use the filter object I thought. Continue reading Filtering Individual Relationships
Here is a strange problem that I encountered. I wanted to show the constituent form with constituent data. I also wanted to know if the user had saved and closed or just closed the form afterwards. If I had not been interested in knowing this information then I would have simply done the following: Continue reading The Case of the Missing Tabs
A while ago I wrote an article about filtering on gifts. I find myself regularly having to reference the knowledgebase link which itself links to an Access database file. Here is a snippet from that other article.
A word on the GiftTypes filter. Here you can filter on cash, pay-cash, pledge, etc. However this is not simply the text but rather an id that the type refers to. This too is not well documented. There is a link in the knowledgebase (http://www.blackbaud.com/esupport/es…r=0&id=BB17413) that gives this information or it can be derived by looking at the SQL or a query.
For example:
oFilter.GiftTypes.Add 1, "Cash" oFilter.GiftTypes.Add 2, "Pay-Cash"
I got somewhat tired of having to download that mdb file each time and some of the gift types stuck, many I forget. So here is the list (mainly for my own reference but for the benefit of anyone else who needs this list):
| Gift Types ID | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Cash |
| 2 | Pay-Cash |
| 3 | MG Pay-Cash |
| 4 | Covenant Payment |
| 8 | Pledge |
| 9 | Stock |
| 10 | Stock (Sold) |
| 11 | Pay-Stock |
| 12 | MG Pay-Stock |
| 13 | Pay-Stock (Sold) |
| 14 | MG Pay-Stock (Sold) |
| 15 | Gift In Kind |
| 16 | Pay-Gift In Kind |
| 17 | MG Pay-Gift In Kind |
| 18 | Other |
| 19 | Pay-Other |
| 20 | MG Pay-Other |
| 21 | Write Off |
| 22 | MG Write Off |
| 24 | Net Covenant |
| 25 | Gross Covenant |
| 26 | Deposited Convenant |
| 27 | MG Pledge |
| 28 | Adjustment |
| 29 | Covenant Write Off |
| 30 | Recurring Gift |
| 31 | Recurring Pay-Cash |
| 32 | GL Reversal |
| 33 | Amendment |
| 34 | Planned Gift |
In export for a recurring gift it is not possible to pull out the bank details specific to that gift. You can only pull the name of the bank or all the banks on the constituent’s record. It is not possible to pull the account number and sort code. This is really important when there are bank issues with recurring gifts that need to be sorted out.