Tag Archives: Gift

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).

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Adjust that tax claim at your peril

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This is perhaps more of a rant than anything else but after being so pleased with the way Blackbaud introduced Batch into the RE:API I now found myself stuck with another piece of Raiser’s Edge functionality that I am less than pleased with.In the UK Gift Aid is big business. In the States (and possibly elsewhere) the donor can claim tax back from charitable donations. In the UK it is the charity that can claim the money back from the government for UK tax payers so this can amount to a very large sum of money if it is handled properly. There have been several changes to Gift Aid over the past four or five versions of Raiser’s Edge. One problem that was not addressed until recently was when Gift Aid had been taken in error and then claimed back from the Inland Revenue. If a gift was given in error then the Gift must be adjusted or written off and the Gift Aid must be reversed. If the Gift Aid was claimed in error (for example the donor was not a tax payer) then the Gift Aid alone must be reversed.
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Fund Missing (Found in an Unexpected Place)

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I had an error that bugged me for a while when I could not work out what the problem was.

I had a list of gifts that I wanted to create on different constituents. I had the constituent id, the date, amount, fund, appeal, campaign, everything that I thought was required.

I got the following error message when trying to save the newly created gift:

Required Field Missing: Fund

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API 7.82 – The Silent Revolution

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I normally keep up with the latest changes in the Raiser’s Edge version.  I thought that the jump from 7.81 to 7.82 was not that great. I knew that there were fixes so that RE would work with Office 2007, there were some more changes to optional modules (I was only really familiar with events), there were new names for items in query and export, another change to Gift Aid and that was about it. At least that was it until I saw an item on the conference pages talking about the new Batch API code that had been made available. What?? Batch API! This is something that I have been asking for forever and it completely threw me when I just stumbled across it. Continue reading API 7.82 – The Silent Revolution →

Custom user defined business rules

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The idea of creating user defined business rules has been discussed in various threads at Blackbus and on the Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge forums (see User Defined Business Rules for example). The whole functionality  is really useful but there are clearly limitations.

One really good use of VBA is to perform this very task. For those not familiar with the build in version it allows you to select a query (constituent, gift or action) and for a all or a limited number of security groups it allows you to display a message on opening the record. This same functionality can be repeated using VBA. Of course you are able to query on a lot more, or perform more than simply display a message. Continue reading Custom user defined business rules →

How I would improve the API

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If I have often wondered if I were in charge of the API at Blackbaud how I would change it. Well unfortunately I don’t wield that kind of power and secondly I am not sure that a major overhaul is required. It is clearly not a modern API being COM based but for the main it works well. However there are still quite a few areas that I would improve upon. I don’t suppose that these will ever happen. Changing the API is no doubt lower on Blackbaud’s list of priorities. With the imminent arrival of the Infinity platform (and, yes, its name does seem to have influenced the pace at which it is being released) , the ability to develop any interface into the system seems a real possibility. RE API by comparison appears somewhat staid and limited. I would imagine it no longer commands the attention at Blackbaud those of us using it would like.

That being said I would love to be proven wrong so Blackbaud if you are listening here are the areas that I would change: Continue reading How I would improve the API →

Static, Dynamic and User-defined code table entries

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I regularly use the API help file and the code examples it contains. After all why reinvent the wheel There is a good example of how to retrieve values from a code table (search for “Code Tables Server” and select the entry with the same name). The example shows you how to create a code table server, load a combo box with certain entries or see if a certain value is in the table.

A while back I was looking to validate the gift pay method. I would retrieve the data from a CSV file and before applying it to the field in the gift I wanted to make sure it was a valid value. This way I could control the error message myself. This help file example was just what I needed.

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Is the API really that expensive?

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I get a lot of questions asking me if a certain change to The Raiser’s Edge can be done. Here is a typical (if somewhat abbreviated conversation)

Them: “We would like to add an attribute every time a constituent is saved. Then we want to synchronize our online giving application with Raisers Edge. Lastly we want to validate fields when entering gifts into Batch.”

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Close down or crash

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One of the basic principles that you need to learn when you start programming the API is that for top level object (constituents, gifts, funds, participants, etc) whenever you initialize the object you need to close it down. This is not too difficult to remember to do and you are swiftly reminded when you close the plug-in or the application (it crashes).

However there are some exceptions to this. When you loop a collection of top level records e.g. CGifts, using the for each construct you also have to close down the individual item. This goes against the above logic as you did not initialize it.
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