If you had not noticed, our website zeidman.info has had a make over. We have also added a new section of everything to do with Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and the Infinity platform. Some of the screencasts there were previously embedded in conference presentations so now they have a home of their own. We are really excited by what the Inifinity platform has to offer (even if it is slow coming to the majority of users). Now you can see for yourself the kinds of customisations that can be developed and just how powerful the platform can be.

Have you been working on any BBEC customisations that you would like to share? Have you seen any others out there in the wild. Leave a comment and let us know.

I have always found attributes to be odd to work with in The Raiser’s Edge API. For some reason Blackbaud treat them somewhat differently than other child objects on a record. I have already spoken about that a few years ago but I wanted to elaborate on a couple of issues.

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The Raiser’s Edge API is somewhat of an antiquated beast. It is very powerful in as much that it allows you to do almost anything that you can do in the application itself. However it is old and uses an old technology (COM). One area where this is shown clearly is its use of collections. Almost all modern languages and frameworks (.NET, Java, php, etc) are zero indexed. This means that if you have an array the first element is accessed at the zero position.

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Recently I was looking through the Zeidman Development website. I followed a link back to this blog. IDLookup was our first product and at the time the a hot new technology had sprung onto the internet. Without a decent screencast recording application (I now use CamStudio), I decided to work with this simple yet very effective web application called ScreenToaster. Despite the funky name it was straight forward to use and did a great job of putting together the demo.

When I checked the other day my IDLookup demo was nowhere to be found. I immediately headed over to ScreenToaster only to find that the site had indeed disappeared. What is more they had taken my screencast with them. Well it was anyway time for an update to show off the latest and greatest functionality so it is back. This time I hope I have chosen a site that will be around a bit longer…

http://www.zeidman.info/downloads/idlookup.php

Valid date to cannot be less than Valid date from

I got this error message the other day when developing with the membership module. In my opinion the membership module is the most complicated module to develop code for. Possibly because of this (and the fact that it is an optional module) there appears to be the least documentation about it. When I searched the knowledgebase for this error I did get a hit. It referred to NetSolutions. It suggested that the membership record did not have an expiry date.

This was not the case in my data. I had an activity date and an expiry date as required.

I worked out what the problem was. The issues happened when adding a membership card. I share this code between new memberships and a case where you may want to add a new membership card to an existing transaction. For a new membership card I was setting the card date as the same as the transaction date. The expiry date, by default was being set to the same as the membership’s expiry date. This worked fine for new memberships.

When I went to add a membership card to, say, a lapsed membership, (why this would happen in reality is uncertain but it was happening in my case), the start date was set to the transaction date i.e. today but the expiry date was in the past so the card’s expiry date was also in the past.

I checked for this scenario and set the membership card’s start date to one day before the expiry date if the expiry date was not after the start date.

I have been using Visual Studio 2010 for a short while now ever since the prospect of developing workflows for Enterprise CRM became a reality. One thing that I noticed when working with The Raiser’s Edge API however is that it is much faster to type out everything.

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I am currently working on a project involving two different Raiser’s Edge databases. One of the problems that I thought that I would have was having to first open one instance of Raiser’s Edge only to find that I needed a piece of information from the other one. I would have to exit and sign out of the one and then log in to the other one. This to-ing and fro-ing, I thought, would drive me crazy.

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Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release of our latest plug-in for The Raiser’s Edge – BatchIt:Action

BatchIt:Action allows you to enter actions en masse in a batch. This is the first of a series of modules in the Batch:It range.

Efficiency
Entering actions one by one is slow. Importing actions in one go is not always practical. BatchIt:Action provides the solution to simply and efficiently entering accurate data.

Templates
Create templates for different types of actions. For example, do you use actions to represent an event, or a request for information. Populate the template with defaults and hide pre-populated fields just as you would in a gift batch.

Custom Validation
For users with advanced requirements set up a custom validation file that implements your organisation’s business rules. Does your event actions always need a t-shirt size? Should a phone action be prevented if the phone number is international? Create custom validation rules to enforce this or let us help you create them. (Requires coding skills, additional custom validation module required)

Demo
More information can be found on our website where you can download a fully working version tied to the Sample database. There is also a screen-cast showing BatchIt:Action in use. If you have any questions then please contact us.

I received a question recently from Markus asking for help. He was new to developing code with the VBA module in The Raiser’s Edge and had a good idea but didn’t know how to make it work

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I don’t write that many Crystal Reports but when I do it is a refreshing change. They integrate nicely with Raiser’s Edge and as I showed with my previous post you can write code that will open up a Crystal Report and run it without having to run an export first. You can use any data source instead of a Raiser’s Edge export. The formula language is quite intuitive if you have worked with VBA, VB6 or VB.NET (and simple enough for those with any other mainstream language experience). However, the other day I need to pad a number with some leading zero. In VB.NET there is the String.LeftPad method which works really well. No such luck with Crystal.

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