I wanted to be able to get a constituent’s address from their record. Sounds simple enough. You just take the address block, the city, the state and zip. Although what happens if they are not in the States or Canada. When you change the country for example, to United Kingdom, the state field disappears and a county field appears in its place. Pulling the state field would just be a blank value.

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Here are the top 10 visited plugins for the month of February. These are ordered by plugins whose follow through link as been visited.

1 Convio DataSync Connector RE
2 Create Preferred Address
3 Action Reminder Updater
4 Alternate Address Deleter
5 Bank Checker Solution
6 Clean Static Queries
7 AFP
8 Audit Trail
9 Add Constituent ID
10 Custom Reports

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.

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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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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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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Since we started the plugin directory new plugins have been added. Here are the most recent additions to the plugin directory. If we have missed any then feel free to add them. Thank you to all those who have added over the past months.

Repair Receipt Type

Unmark DNC

Regenerate Import IDs

Fix Key Position Data for IndRecords2

Clean Static Queries

Fix Trailing Spaces

Expire benefit fix

Update Pending Transactions

Define Patronymic Prefix Excludes

Match Applications and Enrollment

De-Duplicate Phones

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.

In a previous post (Integrating with Excel) I gave a code example of how RE can integrate with Excel. The code was relatively simple. One of the problems with working with Excel is if you embed references to Excel in your project but you are not sure of the version of Excel you will be working with.

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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.

The idea of creating user defined business rules has been discussed in various threads at Blackbus and on the Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge forums (see User Defined Business Rules for example). The whole functionality  is really useful but there are clearly limitations.

One really good use of VBA is to perform this very task. For those not familiar with the build in version it allows you to select a query (constituent, gift or action) and for a all or a limited number of security groups it allows you to display a message on opening the record. This same functionality can be repeated using VBA. Of course you are able to query on a lot more, or perform more than simply display a message. Read the rest of this entry »