RE-Decoded

A technical look at the Raiser’s Edge API from Blackbaud

Integrating with Excel

December 5th, 2007 by David Zeidman

Two common tasks seem to be integrating RE with an Excel file. This can mean two things. Either from a plugin or some RE:VBA code opening a Excel file and extracting the data or it can mean that from within Excel VBA access the RE objects to retrieve some data. The way you handle the two scenarios is quite different.

 If you are trying to connect to Raiser’s Edge from Excel you will need the API module. You connect to RE using the REAPI object and initialize it with a serial number and optionally user name and password. You then use the API in exactly the same way as you would from within RE, i.e. via VBA or any other API application.

 If you want to open up Excel from RE then you will need to create the application objects. This is shown in the example below:

    Dim objExcel As Excel.Application     ' Excel application
    Dim objBook As Excel.Workbook      ' Excel workbook 
    Dim objSheet As Excel.Worksheet     ' Excel Worksheet 
    Dim oConstit As New CRecord    oConstit.Init REApplication.SessionContext
    Set objExcel = CreateObject("excel.application") 'Starts the Excel Session 
    Set objBook = objExcel.Workbooks.Open("C:test.xls")   

    For Each objSheet In objBook.Sheets
        If UCase(objSheet.Name) = "Sheet1" Then
            oConstit.Load CLng(objSheet.Range("A2").Text)
            objSheet.Range("A3").Text = oConstit.Fields(RECORDS_fld_FULL_NAME)
            Exit For
        End If
    Next objSheet
     objBook.Save 
     If Not objBook Is Nothing Then
        objBook.Close
        Set objBook = Nothing
    End If
     If Not objExcel Is Nothing Then 
        objExcel.Quit
        Set objExcel = Nothing
    End If  

 

This is quite self-explanatory code, although Excel has an object model just as RE does which is very large and takes a while to get to understand. There is plenty of Excel API information on MSDN.

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