September 24th, 2007 by 
David Zeidman
When you are supplied all the dlls that an application uses and these are all COM object it is possible to discover things about the application that you would otherwise not normally be able to do. Some people may call this “hacking” but others like myself would prefer the less confrontational description of “investigating”
Posted in Advanced | 
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September 17th, 2007 by David Zeidman
I regularly use the API help file and the code examples it contains. After all why reinvent the wheel There is a good example of how to retrieve values from a code table (search for “Code Tables Server” and select the entry with the same name). The example shows you how to create a code table server, load a combo box with certain entries or see if a certain value is in the table.
A while back I was looking to validate the gift pay method. I would retrieve the data from a CSV file and before applying it to the field in the gift I wanted to make sure it was a valid value. This way I could control the error message myself. This help file example was just what I needed.
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September 9th, 2007 by David Zeidman
In this post I hope to offer some help in installing IDLookup. Many people have downloaded it but it may not be so straight forward to install. Note that these instructions can also be used for installing Query Manager.
If you do not know what IDLookup is here is a brief outline. IDLookup is a plugin that I have created to lookup records in Raiser’s Edge given a list of constituents and their address details. This is useful where you have a third party list given that does not contain your constituent ids (such as many giving sites e.g. JustGiving, FirstGiving, CharityWeb, etc) or cold lists that you want to ensure really are cold. The application can be found on Zeidman Development ->IDLookup. This is a demo version that is tied to the sample database.
Posted in Not code | 4 Comments »
September 5th, 2007 by David Zeidman
I get a lot of questions asking me if a certain change to The Raiser’s Edge can be done. Here is a typical (if somewhat abbreviated conversation)
Them: “We would like to add an attribute every time a constituent is saved. Then we want to synchronize our online giving application with Raisers Edge. Lastly we want to validate fields when entering gifts into Batch.”
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