I have been working on a new version of RETweet which will be released soon. In that version we are allowing users to create constituents from Twitter users. The amount of information that you get from Twitter about the Tweet and the person that tweeted is very limited. The real name of the Twitter user – and it is not always a real name – is given in one field so it could include the first and last name (this is the most common where it is not a Tweeting business).  To make this more useful the application reaches out to a webservice to determine the gender of the person.

The webservice takes the first name and returns gender information and which countries the name appears in. The web service is biased towards European and Western first names but does claim to cover some countries in Asia too.

This could also easily be integrated as a VBA solution so that when you save and close a constituent record, if the gender is unknown the VBA code reaches out to the webservice and populates the code. Here is some sample code that shows you how this is done. This is done using .NET as it is considerably easier to achieve than in the native VBA environment. It would, however, be easy to make a call to a COM visible assembly from the native VBA client to call this method.

' Determines the gender of the person by looking up useing Thomas Bayer's webservice.
Private Sub SetGender(firstName As String, constit as CRecord) 

   Dim xdoc As XDocument
   Try
      'Here we retrieve the XML document from the REST web service
      xdoc = sendXML("http://www.thomas-bayer.com/restnames/name.groovy?name=" & firstName)

      Dim result = xdoc.<restnames>

      'if there is an error then the gender cannot be found
      If result.Descendants("error").Count > 0 Then
         Return
      End If

      'This is not an ideal check as a name can be both male and female
      'but for simplicity we assume this is not the case
      If resultresult.<nameinfo>.<male>.FirstOrDefault.Value.ToLower = "true" Then
         constit.Fields(ERECORDSFields.RECORDS_fld_GENDER) = "male"
      Else
         constit.Fields(ERECORDSFields.RECORDS_fld_GENDER) = "female"
      End If
      Catch
         'If there is an error due to the web service we catch it here and don't bother the end user.
      End Try

End Sub

Private Function sendXML(ByVal uri As String) As XDocument

   Dim request As HttpWebRequest
   Dim response As HttpWebResponse
   Dim reader As XmlReader

   request = HttpWebRequest.Create(uri)
   response = request.GetResponse()

   reader = XmlReader.Create(response.GetResponseStream())
   Return XDocument.Load(reader)

End Function

Look out for our new version of RETweet. It will include this and a lot of other new features!

I have been doing some preparation for my two Blackbaud conference sessions (in London and in Washington D.C.).  Each year I present at the Blackbaud conferences I develop some new code to show. This year is no exception and without going into too much detail I am sure this will not disappoint those who are excited to see what can be done on the Infinity platform that The Raiser’s Edge platform code only ever dream of doing!

The SDK has some great integration with Visual Studio. For starters you are given very many template items to build your own components from. Intellisense works well in both the XML specs that you have to write and also in any corresponding .NET code. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post (Integrating with Excel) I gave a code example of how RE can integrate with Excel. The code was relatively simple. One of the problems with working with Excel is if you embed references to Excel in your project but you are not sure of the version of Excel you will be working with.

Read the rest of this entry »