I have been working on a project to bring in a large amount of data into The Raiser’s Edge. Everyone else on the project has been using SSIS to do this and previously I would probably have manipulated the data in Excel, Access or for the most complicated data written a small application to convert the data into the format that I wanted before importing it into RE. Having used SSIS for a day now I am say that I am converted!

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A lot of the work that I do involves the integration of third party products with The Raiser’s Edge. It is not always right to develop a custom application to perform this integration. There are many factors including the volume of data transfer, the complexity of data, how quickly the data needs to be integrated and of course what budget is available. This article attempts to outline the options available to Raiser’s Edge managers who need to integrate with non-Blackbaud products.

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A few days shy of the end of the year, I hearby present to you the top visited plugins of 2008 (unless of course there is a sudden rush on any of them before midnight in which case the list will be adjusted accordingly). This list is based on the top number of clicks through to the more information about each plug-in supplied by each plug-in author.

Audit Trail
Blackbaud NetCommunity Integration
Bank Checker Solution
Clear Invalid Spouse IDs
Constituent Document Linker
Code Insert Custom Part
Convio DataSync Connector RE
ID Lookup
Action Reminder Updater
CanadianUpdateRE

Thank you to all that have added to the directory during the year and to those that have rated the plug-ins.

The title is somewhat dramatic and probably not relevant to many people however for me and a client that I work with it proved to be a disaster. This is not the first time that Blackbaud has changed the API and it certainly won’t be the last but this was annoying. So what am I referring to?

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I have on several occasions expressed my delight about the arrival of the Batch API. I am still enthusiastic but somewhat war weary having spent this passed week trying to solve problems that have appeared. Clearly the Batch API was not rigorously tested before it was released as otherwise the sort of errors I am getting would not have appeared. In case you have been struggling too or in case you thinking about using this functionality here is what I have been up against.
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Here is a strange problem that I encountered. I wanted to show the constituent form with constituent data. I also wanted to know if the user had saved and closed or just closed the form afterwards. If I had not been interested in knowing this information then I would have simply done the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by a posting on Wired (which in turn was taken from a Wiki on obsolete technologies) I wanted to give you a list of the top five obsolete areas of the RE:API.

1. Read the rest of this entry »

One aspect of the API that is really well thought out is the whole Meta data structure. Back when RE7 was written, there was no reflection built into VB6. Java had it and there was some libraries that could do it but nothing was built in. Reflection (in coding terminology) is the ability to be aware of the classes and methods that are available to the code during run time.

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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

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).

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