All posts by David Zeidman

Newly added plugins

Thank you Steve Best for the following five new entries to the plugin directory. If there are any more that have been missed any then feel free to add them. Thank you to all those who have added over the past months.

  • CanadianUpdateRE
  • Fix for Missing Schedule Starting On Date
  • Fix Constituent Notepads Actual Notes
  • Fix Dupe Primary Banks
  • Fix Appeals For Delete
  • Cannot find the plugin that you are looking for? Get in contact with us and find out how we can make your Raiser’s Edge processes more efficient and make savings in both time and money.

    Membership – Retrieving information

    One very useful way of loading a collection of records is using the custom where clause. For example if you want to find a list of constituents who are born in a certain year you could write the following

    Dim oRecords As New CRecords
    oRecords.INIT SessionContext, tvf_record_CustomWhereClause, "BIRTH_DATE LIKE '1950%'"

    This is the only really effective way of doing this without returning a list of all constituents filtering them in the code (much less efficient).

    Continue reading Membership – Retrieving information

    Adjust that tax claim at your peril

    This is perhaps more of a rant than anything else but after being so pleased with the way Blackbaud introduced Batch into the RE:API I now found myself stuck with another piece of Raiser’s Edge functionality that I am less than pleased with.In the UK Gift Aid is big business. In the States (and possibly elsewhere) the donor can claim tax back from charitable donations. In the UK it is the charity that can claim the money back from the government for UK tax payers so this can amount to a very large sum of money if it is handled properly. There have been several changes to Gift Aid over the past four or five versions of Raiser’s Edge. One problem that was not addressed until recently was when Gift Aid had been taken in error and then claimed back from the Inland Revenue. If a gift was given in error then the Gift must be adjusted or written off and the Gift Aid must be reversed. If the Gift Aid was claimed in error (for example the donor was not a tax payer) then the Gift Aid alone must be reversed.
    Continue reading Adjust that tax claim at your peril

    Filtering and Sorting Participants – Just not Together

    This is being written in response to two hours of trying to get some code to work only to conclude that there was a bug in the API. I am not overly convinced it will be documented any time soon so let it be documented here!

    I wanted to create a collection of participant registrations for a particular constituent. I also wanted to only really look at the most recent three registrations so I needed to both filter and sort. Sounds quite simple really until of course it did not work.

    Continue reading Filtering and Sorting Participants – Just not Together

    Additions to the Plugin Directory

    Since we started the plugin directory new plugins have been added. Here are the most recent additions to the plugin directory. If we have missed any then feel free to add them. Thank you to all those who have added over the past months.

  • Repair Receipt Type
  • Unmark DNC
  • Regenerate Import IDs
  • Fix Key Position Data for IndRecords2
  • Clean Static Queries
  • Fix Trailing Spaces
  • Expire benefit fix
  • Update Pending Transactions
  • Define Patronymic Prefix Excludes
  • Match Applications and Enrollment
  • De-Duplicate Phones
  • Cannot find the plugin that you are looking for? Get in contact with us and find out how we can make your Raiser’s Edge processes more efficient and make savings in both time and money.

    In a .NET plugin “deleting makes Raiser’s Edge go backwards”

    OK so the title can be interpreted in many different ways but what is says in essential the truth.

     I had a complaint from a client who was testing a plugin that I had created. She said that “deleting makes Raiser’s Edge go backwards and that the arrow keys were broken too”. Of course it took some probing for me to work out what she really meant but here is it is.

      Continue reading In a .NET plugin “deleting makes Raiser’s Edge go backwards”

    Fund Missing (Found in an Unexpected Place)

    I had an error that bugged me for a while when I could not work out what the problem was.

    I had a list of gifts that I wanted to create on different constituents. I had the constituent id, the date, amount, fund, appeal, campaign, everything that I thought was required.

    I got the following error message when trying to save the newly created gift:

    Required Field Missing: Fund

    Continue reading Fund Missing (Found in an Unexpected Place)

    Top Plugins in November

    Here are the most popular plugins for the month of November from the plugin directory. This is based on the click through for more information link.

    1. Audit Trail
    2. Action Reminder Updater
    3. Convio DataSync Connector RE
    4. Blackbaud NetCommunity Integration
    5. Constituent Document Linker
    6. Bank Checker Solution
    7. Create Preferred Address
    8. Alternate Address Deleter
    9. AFP
    10. Custom Reports

    Cannot find the plugin that you are looking for? Get in contact with us and find out how we can make your Raiser’s Edge processes more efficient and make savings in both time and money.