Inconsistent Last Changed Date Behaviour

This is less of a coding issue and more of a Raiser’s Edge in general issue. I had known that when you make a change to an address on a constituent both the address’ and the constituent’s last changed date would be updated. This is understandable as you cannot save the address without saving the constituent. Of course you would think that this would be the same for relationships. However when I test this an individual relationship the same is not true. I can update the address and the date changed is updated but the individual date changed is not.

This was not as expected. This had been alright had I developed some software based on this premise but I have now developed some software with the assumption that the date is consistent. Now I have to go back and change my code to allow for this.

In this scenario I am comparing records from The Raiser’s Edge to another system. When selecting the most recent record I use the last changed date. The relationship record date is not updated when the address is updated which means that I could potential choose the wrong record to update.

Most irritating!