NXT Integration SKY API announcement at Blackbaud Developers' Conference 2021

At the Blackbaud Developers' Conference (June 15-17, 2021) we are excited to announce the availability of a new set of SKY API endpoints for use with Raiser's Edge NXT. These endpoints are grouped under a new API container that we are calling the "NXT Data Integration API". There are more than sixty new endpoints designed to enable faster and deeper integrations of Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT with other solutions in your tech stack. The endpoints in the NXT Data Integration API have been optimized for data integration scenarios such as non-interactive periodic data imports or data syncs. (If you are new to the topic of data syncing with RENXT and SKY API be sure to check out our Headless Data Sync GitHub repo featured in our App showcase. ) The endpoints include an expanded set of RENXT data elements and support full CRUD (create, read, update, delete) for RENXT Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, Code Tables, Countries, Constituent Appeals, Phone Types, Gift Notes, Custom Field (aka Attribute) Categories. There are also a handful of utility endpoints in this API such as an endpoint to determine which international flavor of RENXT (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, NewZealand) the system is , or an endpoint that lets you map an RE classic ImportID value to the corresponding System Record ID value used by most RENXT SKY APIs. These endpoints have been created in partnership with our own internal teams working on large scale integration scenarios as well as with a group of early adopter SKY Developer ISV Partners and customer developers who have been giving us feedback along the way. We are grateful to our early adopters for their engagement and feedback and we are excited to now make these endpoints available to the full SKY Developer community so that we can continue to learn from the broader community about how these endpoints help enable your integration solutions.


The model for calling these endpoints is the same as all of the existing RENXT SKY API endpoints that you may be familiar with and already using such as those in the Constituent API or the Gift API. Just like with those APIs your code will pass your subscription key and the OAuth authorization token in the headers of the http request. The authorization model for these endpoints works the same as well in that the endpoints will evaluate access to the endpoint in terms of the Blackbaud ID that is burned into the OAuth token, i.e. the user id of the consenting user. At launch we are requiring that the consenting user of the OAuth grant be an environment admin because our internal telemetry shows that SKY Applications designed for non-interactive (aka headless) integration scenarios are typically implemented via a one-time configuration by the environment administrator, and this fact allows us to make some simplifying assumptions in our implementation that keep our authorization checks optimal with low overhead. With this in mind, if your SKY Application is implemented in a way that you do the OAuth prompt for the admin during a one time setup/configuration as part of onboarding a new customer then this requirement for environment admin permission will be met and these endpoints will be a good fit for your scenario. On the other hand, if the nature of your application is that it performs the OAuth prompt for each individual end user and you anticipate that those end users may not be environment admins then this api won't fit that use case at this time.


An interesting under-the-hood note that doesn't really impact how these endpoints are used but might be of interest to folks curious about how Blackbaud builds things behind the scenes... These endpoints are all delivered using a new and improved continuous delivery pipeline built on Azure DevOps Git Repos, ADO Pipelines, and Azure Kubernetes Service. You may have seen some Blackbaud technical presentations about our "Engineering System", and these endpoints are being delivered on the most modern version of that suite of internal tooling and processes. This modern release pipeline has enabled us to deliver more endpoints faster, and it is one of the reasons this collection of endpoints is grouped together in this new api rather than being folded into the existing SKY APIs. If you are attending the 2021 Developer Conference you will have an opportunity to learn more about our Engineering System in a presentation I am co-hosting titled "Scalable Development Practices for Distributed Teams".