Use of SKY API (Constituent/Gifts) to replace BBNC?

Tom Klingman

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Our company manages a number of non-profit organizations in RE - many with BBNC member sites.


There are some things we can't do in BBNC and would like to use Word Press sites with Sky API calls to our hosted RE data.


However, we haven't been able to do so because: 


We are not able to use SKY API  to make calls because constituent and gifts endpoints are locked down to immutable system ID in transit.


But we use look_up ID (constituent id) as well as a constituent attribute to differentiate one client organization from another.


For example, lookup_id: 14737-123 (123) is the organization code; and constituent attribute "client code" ="123" is the organization code.


We've tried to GET data by the constituent attribute instead (as in const attrib code = "123"). 


This is an attempt to pull an entire client list and do back-end processing, but we get maxed/timed out.


I don't remember the exact number (maybe it's 500 max constituents you can pull with each call) and now 5,000 gifts?


Many of our organizations have far more members/gifts than this upper limit. We can't find a way to effectively manipulate data w/these severe limitations for live websites.


This is not a minor problem for us when we can't develop.


What else can we do???


Issues of immutable versus unique lookup IDs aside for a moment:


Was Sky API (w/constituent and gifts) really meant/intended to be used for online membership management websites, like BBNC is?


We were told years ago this was the path out of BBNC, but it's doesn't feel that way.


For all the time (on/off) that I've been on this site, I really haven't seen anyone using it as a membership website like BBNC.


I thought that SKY API would have expanded the number of endpoints available over BBNC, but I notice in many (all?) cases that endpoints mirror the same limitations as BBNC.


An example is the inability to access the entire spouse record i (unless it's an entirely separate record!). Or can't access "no valid addresses" field on RE bio screen.


Bottom line, with constituent and gifts SKY endpoints, is there a development plan to open up end-points to ones not available now in BBNC or will it continue to mirror BBNC?


This is so frustrating.


I'm coming from SQL database and server world where I can query any data field(s) in my database and publish on our webservers and easily at that.


What about this development environment that makes that so difficult or impossible to replicate? 


Tom