RE-Decoded | A technical look at the Raisers Edge API from Blackbaud (and other occasional musings)

Time 2020-12-25 09:04:10

Web Name: RE-Decoded | A technical look at the Raisers Edge API from Blackbaud (and other occasional musings)

WebSite: http://www.re-decoded.com

ID:145432

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at,the,Raisers,

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The SKY API documentation is very good compared to many APIs that I work with. One area that is particularly useful is the Try It area where you can test an endpoint with your own data. One small annoyance is that if you want to try a number of different endpoints, you need to go through the whole oAuth2 process each time.Using Postman allows you to avoid this and also take advantage of a number of other features of that application. One nice feature is the ability to generate access tokens with ease so that they do not need to be refreshed each time you run an endpoint. (You will still need to refresh them after the allotted 60 minute life but that should give you plenty of time to run a number of endpoints)This post shows you how to set up Postman for oAuth2 in the simplest way possible. I am not an expert in Postman and there may well be things that I have missed that could make the process even easier. Let me know in the comments if you do something differently!It is probably wise to have a separate Blackbaud application for Postman rather than using an application that you use in production.This is my very basic app. For Postman you do not need a live redirect URI but you do need one as the SKY OAuth2 process requires that the value you send in matches a value on your app.In my postman I have a collection of Sky API endpoint calls. You are able to add authorisation details to the main folder and have each endpoint inherit the credentials from that rather than having to enter them each time.When I click on the Sky API link I can enter my credentials for the whole folder. Hopefully most of the values are self-explanatory. You should start with the section Configure New Token .State: You could put a value here but it has no real use in the context of PostmanPress the Get New Access Token button. This will prompt you to log into Blackbaud and go through the OAuth2 process. It will then save a token in the Current Token area. This is then used by your calls.Now that you have set up authorisation, you can proceed to try a call. You will still need to add your subscription id to the header as shown. (If anybody knows of a way to add that value on the folder level let me know!)Put the URL in the address box and change the authorisation to inherit from parent as shown belowThis can be found on your developer account here: https://developer.blackbaud.com/subscriptions/Then you are ready to press the Send button to retrieve data from SKY API This year will be a very strange BBCon. Gone is the flight over, the anticipation, hoards of people all in one place, the discussion over the food, the inevitable bacon joke (does that joke ever get old?), the jet lag and of course, all that swag. One thing still there though are the quality speakers and sessions. As with each year I am giving a round up of the most interesting speakers and anticipated sessions. These are all my personal opinion which is, of course, from a more technical perspective so if I have left anybody off the list that justifiably should be on then I apologise in advance.We make use of OData in Chimpegration Cloud for Altru. From a technical perspective it is one of the most important distinctions between the Altru development platform (Infinity) and the SKY API. OData allows any query that has been put together in Altru to be streamed to other platforms, in our case, Chimpegration but importantly applications such as Excel, Power BI and other analytic applications. Definitely one to watch if you need access to your data in a more advanced setting.This session is a great follow up to the session that I did last year with Graham Getty (From Crystal to Cloud. See the live demo part here). Where Graham and I looked at ways in which you could replace and enhance legacy functionality and move to the cloud, Thomas and Linton take another look at how those capabilities have changed and added some that Graham and I may well have missed. Definitely worth taking a look at.As developers we sometimes forget life before the Cloud. The ease with which you can reach all your resources wherever you may be is something that web applications strive to help customers with. And yet I still find resonance with Eric s opening sentence: Remember when the internet felt expensive, untrustworthy and complicated? . When I compare developing a plugin to developing a cloud solution this still rings true. If I still get nostalgia over desktop applications then surely less than technical users may well feel the same. This session is sure to convince you otherwise.I have seen some of the customisations that Stu and his team have produced and I am regularly impressed. The SKY API platform has come a long way from the early days and there is now so much more functionality available to developers to customise RE NXT. It will certainly be fascinating to see what new and exciting utilities Stu has to offer. If you are new to developing or want to get started make sure that you take a look at this session and quiz Ben who has all the answers!This session is becoming an annual favourite. Having missed it at BBCon 2019 in Nashville (the room was too packed to get into), I managed to see it at BBCon 2019 London. Now husband and wife team (sorry if I spoiled the worst kept secret outside of Blackbaud) are back. Lisa and Jarod know NXT inside out and have found ways of working with it that overcomes any drawbacks that you might find. I felt that this session was worth it even though I am not working with NXT on a day to day basis. You can be sure that they will have some new tips and tricks up their sleeves as well as showing the best ones from last year.No session list would be complete without Bill Connors. Bill wrote the book on Raiser s Edge (literally). It will be great to see a session looking at NXT security. While the database view is somewhat of a known entity, the new NXT modules are, for me at least, somewhat of a mystery. How you link that functionality with good organisation policies will be essential viewing for anybody managing a database. I just came back from BBCon in Nashville all fired up ready to create a SKY UX Addin. For those of you new to this, this can be a tile in a SKY based application i.e. Raiser s Edge NXT (and other components are to come in the future).I have tried this in the past without much luck. There were issues with the sky ux cli not working on my Windows machine (I am told the dev team use mainly Macs). Fast forward a few years and I thought that I would give it a go.Before I start, I just wanted to say that the documentation that Blackbaud have produced for all aspects of the SKY developer platform is really very good. It is so much better than anything that they have ever produced in the past. I wanted to document this in case anybody should ever run into the same difficulty. It may be that you will never have this problem (especially if you, unlike me, actually read the prerequisites before starting!)However, before I can even start with that I needed to install the SKY UX sdk. This is done with the following:I then followed the instructions in the main article. I fired up Visual Studio Code, started a terminal window and went into my project directory. addin template successfully cloned.Setting @blackbaud/skyux version 2.54.1Setting @blackbaud/skyux-builder version 1.36.0× Running npm install (can take several minutes)npm install failed.This gave me much more information. It told me that python was not installed on my system so it could not work.I ran the following to install python. However this was not all plain sailing either I ran this from an command prompt run as AdministratorThis first time this ran it told me that Python was installed successfully but then it just sat there for a while. Task manager told me that the command prompt was doing something but nothing happened on the screen. I waited for at least half an hour. The command prompt no longer appear to be working hard (according to task manager) so I broke out of the process (CTRL+C). I ran the same process again and it worked very quickly returning me back to the command prompt.The next step according to the instructions was to serve the application. There is one, probably obvious step, that is missing from the instructions. In Visual Studio Code you need to open the folder where your project has been install. When you first open VSC assuming that no previous workspace or folder has been opened (I had closed mine) all you have is the welcome page. Click on the open folder button to show your app in the folder structure. Do you use Mailchimp? Or even if you use another email marketing tool what is your process? After writing and rewriting the text, designing and redesigning the layout, adding graphics, seeking feedback and finally sending out one of the greatest appeals you have ever done, you wait for the responses.Of course the best type of response is the donations that come flooding in but the other kind, the ones that count towards determining your constituent segments and who to target in the future, also arrive. Every bounce, unsubscribe, open and click helps you to work out who is going to become that next major donor and who does not want to hear from you again (maybe your choice of dancing cats in the appeal email should be revisited the next time around!)You pull up a report in Mailchimp and painstakingly update BBCRM with those unsubscribes and bounces; do you really have time to add the numerous clicks too?With Chimpegration Cloud, you set up your process to retrieve different results. Track your opens and clicks by adding interactions. Mark your constituents as ‘do not contact’ or add an attribute if they unsubscribe. Set the email to an invalid email address for bounces or go crazy and do any combination of the above.You can also export your records to Mailchimp to start with. Set up a query and push the constituents out to Mailchimp.You can do all of this as a one off or you can set up a schedule so that it runs at night with everything ready for you when you walk through the office door the next day.(That was a rhetorical question I wasn’t expecting anybody to put their hand up.)A. Real-time processing. What does that mean? Simple. You set up an action so that as soon as a constituent subscribes, bounces or unsubscribes it feeds directly into BBCRM!This is just the beginning. We are constantly updating the application and adding new features. Look out for import soon.If you are interested (and who wouldn t be if you have managed to read this far) then why not take a two week trial or get in touch to ask us a question. Do you use Mailchimp? Or even if you use another email marketing tool what is your process? After writing and rewriting the text, designing and redesigning the layout, adding graphics, seeking feedback and finally sending out one of the greatest appeals you have ever done, you wait for the responses.Of course the best type of response is the donations that come flooding in but the other kind, the ones that count towards determining your constituent segments and who to target in the future, also arrive. Every bounce, unsubscribe, open and click helps you to work out who is going to become that next major donor and who does not want to hear from you again (maybe your choice of dancing cats in the appeal email should be revisited the next time around!)You pull up a report in Mailchimp and painstakingly update Altru with those unsubscribes and bounces; do you really have time to add the numerous clicks too?With Chimpegration Cloud, you set up your process to retrieve different results. Track your opens and clicks by adding interactions. Mark your constituents as ‘do not contact’ or add an attribute if they unsubscribe. Set the email to an invalid email address for bounces or go crazy and do any combination of the above.You can also export your records to Mailchimp to start with. Set up a query and push the constituents out to Mailchimp.You can do all of this as a one off or you can set up a schedule so that it runs at night with everything ready for you when you walk through the office door the next day.(That was a rhetorical question I wasn’t expecting anybody to put their hand up.)A. Real-time processing. What does that mean? Simple. You set up an action so that as soon as a constituent subscribes, bounces or unsubscribes it feeds directly into Altru!This is just the beginning. We are constantly updating the application and adding new features. Look out for import soon.If you are interested (and who wouldn t be if you have managed to read this far) then why not take a two week trial or get in touch to ask us a question. When NXT was announced at BBCon 2014 there was some initial confusion as to what it would mean for Raiser s Edge users. I have to be honest, at the time I was underwhelmed. I could see the logic of moving gradually to the cloud but it wasn t exciting. As the years have gone by and NXT has matured and developed I have begun to see the benefits.Of course DBAs still spend a lot of time in the traditional database view and there is a lot of impatience for NXT to catch up so that the web view goodness is delivered to those who are heavily involved with Raiser s Edge. As developers we have had high hopes for the web based API. All of a sudden we could break out of the plugins area and develop Chimpegration s potential.Chimpegration Cloud follows a similar pattern to Raiser s Edge NXT. Some features are found in the database view plugin and also found in the web Cloud version. However where Chimpegration Cloud shines is with the new possibilities available.Up until now it has only been possible to schedule processes with on-premise installations of Chimpegration. As standard, it is now possible to collect bounces, unsubscribes, opens, clicks and more on a regular basis. Set it up and let it run. Have it run at night so that the results are ready for when you arrive in the office in the morning. Or sit with your coffee and be mesmerised as the number of processed records increases.Q. What could be better than scheduling a process? (That was a rhetorical question I wasn t expecting anybody to put their hand up) A. Real-time processing. What does that mean? Simple. You set up an action so that as soon as a constituent subscribes, bounces or unsubscribes it feeds directly into RE!This is just the beginning. Chimpegration Cloud is waiting for the SKY API to catch up! We want to offer exports (the functionality is in place for Altru and BBCRM so come on SKY API team give us data export!) and we are working on import.We are the masters of our own destiny servers. This means that if we see that processing is going slowly we can ramp up the power. You no longer have to share your Chimpegration processing power with others.If you are interested (and who wouldn t be if you have managed to read this far) then why not take a two week trial or get in touch to ask us a question. This follows on from the second part of my guide to creating a donation from through SKY API The source code for this and the other parts of this series is available on Github.In this part we are going to actually doing something with the donor details and their credit card.We are using .NET on our server. You could use any language to do this but I am mostly familiar with working with .NET. I am going to assume here that you are either familiar with .NET or you are able to translate the concepts into your own language.I created a new project in Visual Studio 2017. I chose an ASP.NET Web Application and selected the WebAPI option without authentication.  I added a new controller to my project Web API 2 Controller Empty called DonationController. Continue reading Creating a Donation Form through SKY API into Raiser s Edge NXT Part 3 (Server back end) This follows on from the first part of my guide to creating a donation from through SKY API The source code for this and the other parts of this series is available on Github.Now we are going to focus on the web page that captures the donation.We are going to show the minimum here. You will want to include data validation to ensure that the incoming data is valid. You will also want some form of security to ensure that you don t end up sending a lot of spam into your Raiser s Edge.On this page we are making use of some simple html, some javascript and the Stripe Checkout API which makes an easy and PCI compliant way of capturing a credit card.OK, Let s begin! Continue reading Creating a Donation Form through SKY API into Raiser s Edge NXT Part 2 (Web front end) This post is in response to a thread on the Raiser s Edge User Group Support Forum on Facebook. If you are not already a member then I can highly recommend it. There are some very talented individuals there who have been using Raiser s Edge for a long time and have a wealth of experience!The question asked was whether anybody had created a donation form on a website which would capture information and send it through to RE NXT.There are a number of different possibilities here. You could create a complex web application that captures donations like ones that are already commercially available e.g. Classy, Crowdrise, OneCause, FunRaise, 4AGoodCause, WeDidIt, MobileCause, FundRazr, etc to name a few to name the ones that Importacular currently integrates with. From an end user perspective these have a lot of functionality that makes donating an easier experience. Continue reading Creating a Donation Form through SKY API into Raiser s Edge NXT Part 1 (Overview) Every so often we get a support question from a user asking us how they can import data like the following that appears in one Excel column: Dr David A Zeidman PhD We have invariably told them that this is very difficult to manage and that they would have to manually break up the one column into the 5 separate components (title, first name, middle name, last name and suffix) so that they could map them.With Importacular 3.5 (available now for self-hosted organizations and coming within an indeterminate period of time for Blackbaud hosted users) you are able import combined fields like this.The new constituent area settings allows you to split one field on your incoming file or data source into parts. The logic takes into consideration common titles, first name and last name (taken from US survey data) as well as suffixes. It also handles multi-word last names e.g. Von Trap or De La Fuente.What is the best part of this? There is absolutely no extra cost to use this feature. It is included as standard irrespective of whether you have purchased any other data sources.Download the latest version of Importacular now!

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