They seem to have solved their login issues as well; for a while there our staff had trouble accessing the online lessons without repeatedly logging in.

The way you would do this is to schedule your SSIS package so that it runs every so often then using RE:Queue (assuming that you have that module and that you can get it to work – it can be temperamental) you can schedule the imports to work at certain times so that in theory the process is seamless.

David

Writing back directly to the Raiser’s Edge tables is a serious taboo. For one it invalidates your maintenance agreement with Blackbaud. The Raiser’s Edge front end, along with the API perform a lot of validation checks on the data that just doesn’t happen when write directly back to the tables and that is why it would be so very easy to corrupt the database if you try to do it that way.

If you do not want to use the API then one solution is to use SSIS to create import files in exactly the correct format with all the linked import ids required to update data. These files can then be imported into RE in a simple step or two. If you have written you SSIS well so that it performs a lot of checks and looks up existing data then the import should not produce any exceptions making the process relatively painless.

David

I’m interested in this post as we are looking to do an integration with RE. We would prefer not to use the API. Have you done any integration using SSIS to create/update constituents? Are there any issues with writing direct to the SQL tables? The table structure seems quite ‘interesting’. I would be very grateful for your thoughts.

Thanks,
John Davies
Chief Information Officer
Cancer Council NSW, Sydney, Australia

Would it even be possible to take the functionality of RE and separate it from the 32-bit Windows application to create a new interface?

There’s just so much functionality inherently embedded in the application I can’t see that being an easy thing…