RE-Decoded

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

Newly added plugins

February 25th, 2008 by David Zeidman

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.

    Posted in Beginner | No Comments »

    Describe a constituent in their dialogue window

    February 25th, 2008 by David Zeidman

    When you open up a constituent record wouldn’t it be good to see a one line overview of the most important distinguishing features of their record even if they are on different tabs? This tip shows you how to put this information into the window dialogue title.

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    Posted in Beginner | 1 Comment »

    Membership - Retrieving information

    February 11th, 2008 by David Zeidman

    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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    Posted in Beginner | No Comments »

    Adjust that tax claim at your peril

    February 4th, 2008 by David Zeidman

    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.

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    Posted in Beginner | 2 Comments »

    Filtering and Sorting Participants - Just not Together

    February 1st, 2008 by David Zeidman

    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.

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    Posted in Intermediate | 1 Comment »