I wrote some code for a client a while back and tested it thoroughly and everything worked fine. There was somewhat of a delay before the client was due to implement it and when they ran the application it crashed at the beginning. After some investigation we worked out what was going on. The code gathered together a collection of constituents that had two constituent codes. Only now one of them was no longer in The Raiser’s Edge. Read the rest of this entry »
I wrote a recent customisation where I needed to start with an empty database with no constituents and put in a subset of records from my client’s database. I took the sample database and globally deleted all records. So far so good.
Some code that I had written ages ago was going to be a part of this customisation and I ran it as part of a larger piece. The code would load all constituents (OK I forgot that I did not have any) and select the first one. This is a really simple task but I got some strange results.
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.
This screencast of IDLookup shows you how perform a lookup based on data coming in from an online donation page. The data is downloaded from the website without constituent ids. We run IDLookup and find several matches. We are now able to import the data into The Raiser’s Edge with existing constituent information being updated and new constituents being created.
For more information about IDLookup or to download a fully working version (tied to the sample database) visit the IDLookup download page.
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:
This is less of a coding issue and more of a Raiser’s Edge in general issue. I had known that when you make a change to an address on a constituent both the address’ and the constituent’s last changed date would be updated. This is understandable as you cannot save the address without saving the constituent. Read the rest of this entry »
What better way of starting the new year than taking a look at the next generation of Blackbaud’s products that are based on their Infinity platform. A couple of products have already been released but unlike many other products released into the IT wild Blackbaud has chosen, wisely in my opinion, to make the release a quiet affair and not a must have upgrade. I have managed to take a look at Blackbaud CRM. This product is aimed at the larger fundraising organisation and its flexibility certain shows this.
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.
The IBBMacroProperties interface promised some nice enhancements to VBA macros. However of the three properties in the interface only one of them actually works.
When I first started out working with Raisers Edge API I realised that I was reusing many routines over and over and that would it not be better to create my own tools class so that I would not reinvent the wheel. Over the years I have added items to this class that I have found useful and have developed older items in order to do more things. In this post I will share with you some of the items that I find invaluable. Read the rest of this entry »
April 30th, 2009 by 
David Zeidman
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