I have been developing some updates for The Mergician. There are some nice additions coming soon including clean up of duplicate attributes and appeals following the merge. However one item that has been added is the request to select a record as the primary constituent if it has a NetCommunity Login associated with it. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote an article a while back about the setting up a non-production database, I thought that I had the registry and how Blackbaud use it well understood. Of course that was before Vista, Windows 7 and elevated admin rights.

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A few days ago I put a question on both Blackbus and the official Blackbaud forums asking if anybody had written a plug-in in C#. I have written a number of customisations in C# (VB.NET is my most common programming language – although I do enjoy using C#) but I had never written a plug-in before. It has always been a web service of application of some kind. I managed to work out how to do it and thought that I would share my solution here. Read the rest of this entry »

Most people who regularly read this blog will hopefully (for their sake) never have to encounter this issue that has plagued me ever since I upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 (and then later Visual Studio 2008) and Vista (and then later Windows 7). Working with setup and deployment project is supposed to make life easier but I have had nothing but trouble with them.

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As I mentioned in a previous post I have been working on some sample demonstration material for The Blackbaud Conferences in London and Washington DC. I got a timeout error previously on saving data in a custom form. I was able to fix it entirely by fluke without knowing how I did it. However now I have got it again and it has been driving me crazy.

I am currently working on a project where I need to copy a gift record from one constituent to another. There are 213 fields on the regular gift object i.e. CGift. That is without looking at any of the other areas of the gift such as attributes, notepads, etc. It would take a lot of typeing to copy between each field so to do this I use the meta data that is supplied with each object. Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier post I looked at the way in which it is possible to open up a Crystal Report from VB or VBA code in The Raiser’s Edge. That was with version 8.5 of Crystal Reports. I tried to do the same thing recently with a report created in Crystal Reports 11 and the code broke. I rewrote the code using a newer object and technique.

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One of the methods for writing VBA code that fires when, say a constituent is saved, is to write a VBA DLL. I have covered this previously so I won’t go into details in this post. However what do you do if you need one VBA DLL to talk to another one? For example if I make a change to a record in one VBA DLL and have installed Zeidman Development’s Audit Trail application (excuse me for the gratuitous plug there) how do I tell the audit trail to make a note of this change? The VBA events are only fired when the Raiser’s Edge GUI opens up or saves a record and not when the code does so.

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Custom where clauses are  a great way of filtering the results of all the top object collections (where the method exists). However there are some pitfalls. One such pitfall can be found when you try to write sub selects to link to other tables. For example, say you want to find all the individual relation records that have the surname “Zeidman” and are spouses. You would write a sub select in the custom where clause as shown below:

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I am sure that there are a many people out there who still use VB6 when working with The Raiser’s Edge API but it is more and more common that you need to write .NET code and indeed want to write .NET code. There are several reasons for this but for me it is simply that the Visual Studio 2008 is a thousand time better than the VB6 development environment. I cringe every time I have to go back to a piece of old code or to the VBA environment. What really interests me is the choice of VB.NET or C# for development.

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