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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Normally when we look up at a Raiser’s Edge constituent we use a variety of identifiers to find the specific record we are looking for. It may be that we are using biographical data such as surname, first name and parts of their address. To find a one unique record we need to search by unique identifier. The most obvious that we think of is the constituent Id. This is the most common unique Id available to us on the constituent search screen. Of course there is the national insurance number (also known as social security number in the US), and the membership Id (for those with the optional Membership module).

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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.

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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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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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!

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!

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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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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