Tag Archives: The Raiser’s Edge

A first look at Blackbaud’s Infinity platform

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What better way of starting the new year than taking a look at the next generation of Blackbaud’s products that are based on their Infinity platform. A couple of products have already been released but unlike many other products released into the IT wild Blackbaud has chosen, wisely in my opinion, to make the release a quiet affair and not a must have upgrade. I have managed to take a look at Blackbaud CRM. This product is aimed at the larger fundraising organisation and its flexibility certain shows this.

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Is the field required?

Advanced,

In Config, Fields it is possible to set your own fields to be required or not. For example if I wanted every organisation record in Raiser’s Edge to have a profession then I would tick the profession tick box as being required. In order to future proof my code it is necessary to check to see which fields are required so that when creating a new organization I can also prompt for the required fields too. This is not such a difficult task really only that the code below does not work as expected.

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Lookup by constituent system id – a new free plugin

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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.

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Blackbaud European Conference 2008

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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

Using the RE Controls – Part 1

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There are a lot of controls that The Raiser’s Edge uses and that you can use in your code to give it a similar look and feel. This article is an introduction to using one of these controls – the SuperEdit70Ex. Like most of the API this is not documented. Indeed this really is not documented. There is no extra documentation other than by looking at the object browser.

  Continue reading Using the RE Controls – Part 1 →

Validating a Constituent Batch

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Previously I have integrated Quick Address from QAS with The Raiser’s Edge. I implemented their pro API in order to validate the address on saving the constituent/relationship/participant and on demand using the VBA macro button. I created a plugin to update addresses en masse using their batch API. I implemented their pro API to create a “silent” validation during import. The one thing that I didn’t do at the time was to validate addresses in a constituent batch. At the time this was not a requirement.

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Newly added plugins

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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

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    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).

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