Category Archives: Beginner

Valid date to cannot be less than Valid date from when saving a Raiser’s Edge Membership record

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Valid date to cannot be less than Valid date from

I got this error message the other day when developing with the membership module. In my opinion the membership module is the most complicated module to develop code for. Possibly because of this (and the fact that it is an optional module) there appears to be the least documentation about it. When I searched the knowledgebase for this error I did get a hit. It referred to NetSolutions. It suggested that the membership record did not have an expiry date.

This was not the case in my data. I had an activity date and an expiry date as required.

I worked out what the problem was. The issues happened when adding a membership card. I share this code between new memberships and a case where you may want to add a new membership card to an existing transaction. For a new membership card I was setting the card date as the same as the transaction date. The expiry date, by default was being set to the same as the membership’s expiry date. This worked fine for new memberships.

When I went to add a membership card to, say, a lapsed membership, (why this would happen in reality is uncertain but it was happening in my case), the start date was set to the transaction date i.e. today but the expiry date was in the past so the card’s expiry date was also in the past.

I checked for this scenario and set the membership card’s start date to one day before the expiry date if the expiry date was not after the start date.

Subtle changes in Visual Studio 2010 make Raiser’s Edge API less typing

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I have been using Visual Studio 2010 for a short while now ever since the prospect of developing workflows for Enterprise CRM became a reality. One thing that I noticed when working with The Raiser’s Edge API however is that it is much faster to type out everything.

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Multiple Versions of The Raiser’s Edge Open at one time

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I am currently working on a project involving two different Raiser’s Edge databases. One of the problems that I thought that I would have was having to first open one instance of Raiser’s Edge only to find that I needed a piece of information from the other one. I would have to exit and sign out of the one and then log in to the other one. This to-ing and fro-ing, I thought, would drive me crazy.

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Enter Actions in Batch with a new plug-in

Beginner,

Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release of our latest plug-in for The Raiser’s Edge – BatchIt:Action

BatchIt:Action allows you to enter actions en masse in a batch. This is the first of a series of modules in the Batch:It range.

Efficiency
Entering actions one by one is slow. Importing actions in one go is not always practical. BatchIt:Action provides the solution to simply and efficiently entering accurate data.

Templates
Create templates for different types of actions. For example, do you use actions to represent an event, or a request for information. Populate the template with defaults and hide pre-populated fields just as you would in a gift batch.

Custom Validation
For users with advanced requirements set up a custom validation file that implements your organisation’s business rules. Does your event actions always need a t-shirt size? Should a phone action be prevented if the phone number is international? Create custom validation rules to enforce this or let us help you create them. (Requires coding skills, additional custom validation module required)

Demo
More information can be found on our website where you can download a fully working version tied to the Sample database. There is also a screen-cast showing BatchIt:Action in use. If you have any questions then please contact us.

Crystal Reports in need of padding

Beginner

I don’t write that many Crystal Reports but when I do it is a refreshing change. They integrate nicely with Raiser’s Edge and as I showed with my previous post you can write code that will open up a Crystal Report and run it without having to run an export first. You can use any data source instead of a Raiser’s Edge export. The formula language is quite intuitive if you have worked with VBA, VB6 or VB.NET (and simple enough for those with any other mainstream language experience). However, the other day I need to pad a number with some leading zero. In VB.NET there is the String.LeftPad method which works really well. No such luck with Crystal.

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How many unique IDs should a Raiser’s Edge Consituent have?

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Normally when we look up at a Raiser’s Edge constituent we use a variety of identifiers to find the specific record we are looking for. It may be that we are using biographical data such as surname, first name and parts of their address. To find a one unique record we need to search by unique identifier. The most obvious that we think of is the constituent Id. This is the most common unique Id available to us on the constituent search screen. Of course there is the national insurance number (also known as social security number in the US), and the membership Id (for those with the optional Membership module).

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A First Customisation For Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (BBEC) on the Infinity Platform

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Zeidman Development are proud to release the first customisation for Blackbaud Enterprise CRM on the Infinity Platform. Google Calendar Integration for BBEC allows users to save events and have them published to their Google calendar. This first release is relatively simple as it only allows for new events to be published. The source code for this can be found on Zeidman.info. If you don’t feel inclined to compile and install the source code then check out the screen cast below for more information.

For those of you still on Raiser’s Edge 7 (don’t worry you are in the vast majority at the time of writing) Zeidman Development is also pleased to release a Google Calendar Integration plug-in for The Raiser’s Edge. See here to download and look at the screencast below for an overview.

Coming soon the Google Calendar Integration Pro which will include the integration of participants from your calendar to The Raiser’s Edge event and vice versa.

Filling a .NET dropdown with static code table entries

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In a previous post (Filling a .NET dropdown with code table entries) I described how it was possible to fill a .NET dropdown with dynamic code table entries such as title or address types, etc. When I tried to do the same thing with static table entries (e.g. gift types, payment types, etc) it proved a lot harder and a lot less intuitive.

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Opening a link from a Constituent

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There was a question recently on Blackbus asking how to open a link from a constituent record. For example if you had an external system that uses constituent ids to find individuals it would be very useful to be able to open a web page from the constituent window by pressing the macro button and going to the web page that is specific for the constituent. This requires the VBA module. Here is how it is done:

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