Category Archives: Beginner

Plug-in order

Beginner, ,

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!

IDLookup – A new version

Beginner, ,

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!

Lookup by constituent system id – a new free plugin

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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.

Continue reading Lookup by constituent system id – a new free plugin →

Removing from a collection

Beginner,

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.

Continue reading Removing from a collection →

The Full Address

Beginner, ,

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.

Continue reading The Full Address →

Newly added plugins

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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.

    Membership – Retrieving information

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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).

    Continue reading Membership – Retrieving information →