RE-Decoded

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

A First Customisation For Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (BBEC) on the Infinity Platform

April 2nd, 2009 by David Zeidman

Zeidman Development are proud to release the first customisation for Blackbaud Enterprise CRM on the Infinity Platform. Google Calendar Integration for BBEC allows users to save events and have them published to their Google calendar. This first release is relatively simple as it only allows for new events to be published. The source code for this can be found on Zeidman.info. If you don’t feel inclined to compile and install the source code then check out the screen cast below for more information.

For those of you still on Raiser’s Edge 7 (don’t worry you are in the vast majority at the time of writing) Zeidman Development is also pleased to release a Google Calendar Integration plug-in for The Raiser’s Edge. See here to download and look at the screencast below for an overview.

Coming soon the Google Calendar Integration Pro which will include the integration of participants from your calendar to The Raiser’s Edge event and vice versa.

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Filling a .NET dropdown with static code table entries

March 30th, 2009 by David Zeidman

In a previous post (Filling a .NET dropdown with code table entries) I described how it was possible to fill a .NET dropdown with dynamic code table entries such as title or address types, etc. When I tried to do the same thing with static table entries (e.g. gift types, payment types, etc) it proved a lot harder and a lot less intuitive.

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Opening a link from a Constituent

February 23rd, 2009 by David Zeidman

There was a question recently on Blackbus asking how to open a link from a constituent record. For example if you had an external system that uses constituent ids to find individuals it would be very useful to be able to open a web page from the constituent window by pressing the macro button and going to the web page that is specific for the constituent. This requires the VBA module. Here is how it is done:

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Plug-in order

February 3rd, 2009 by David Zeidman

This question has been eating away at me for ages. When you go to the Plug-ins module in The Raiser’s Edge and see the various plug-ins installed I often wonder is there any kind of order to them. Some of them appear to be in alphabetical order but then one will sneak up on you and mess up the theory. They are not in date installed order as you often get the Blackbaud plug-ins coming in the middle. The only one common theme is that the .NET plug-ins appear to come last. Come on Blackbaud what’s the deal here? I need to know!

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IDLookup – A new version

December 5th, 2008 by David Zeidman

I am pleased to announce the release of IDLookup version 1.1.5. This is just an incremental upgrade with the small additions of support for searching by title and by gender.

As always if you already own a copy of IDLookup then follow this link to download the new version. Use the same serial number if prompted.

If you do not own a copy then why not download a trial version at Zeidman Development. And now for a limited time only (thanks to Her Majesty’s government) UK buyers can get the reduced VAT rate! If you are buying from outside of the UK then take advantage of the low exchange rate. Due to the exchange rate the US dollar equivalent price is now 27% lower than it was four weeks ago!

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IBBMacroProperties – A very useful interface if it worked

November 24th, 2008 by David Zeidman

The IBBMacroProperties interface promised some nice enhancements to VBA macros. However of the three properties in the interface only one of them actually works.

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Lookup by constituent system id – a new free plugin

October 17th, 2008 by David Zeidman

There was a post on Blackbus recently where a Raiser’s Edge user was having trouble mapping the output of a third party system to RE. The other system had the constituent system id and did not have the import id or the constituent ids so importing the data directly into RE was proving to be a problem. It would also be difficult to do any kind of lookup natively in RE unless it was done manually through a query.

I suggested that this was a straight forward solution if you were to write a plugin. In fact I felt that it was so straight forward that I would just write it. So here it is a new plugin that takes a system constituent id and outputs the constituent and import ids appending them to a copy of the input file.

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Removing from a collection

August 29th, 2008 by David Zeidman

One issue I had when I first started was how do I remove a child object from a collection. For example if I want to remove one constituent code from a constituent I need to loop through them, find the one I want to remove and remove it. My fear though was that if I simply remove it whilst looping won’t I mess up the collection? This can happen in some classes.

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The Full Address

June 5th, 2008 by David Zeidman

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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Most Visited Plugins for February

March 3rd, 2008 by David Zeidman

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

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