API to List Raiser's Edge NXT Users

Jeff Johnson

I am working on an interface for our HR data load into Raiser's Edge NXT.  A question came up about the ability to check if a recently terminated employee has access to Raiser's Edge.  If they do, send a notification to an Admin to take action.  I'm not finding an API allowing me to get a list of active Raiser's Edge users.  Anyone know of a way to achieve this?  If there isn't a way we are considering adding an attribute to the constituent records for each user to indicate they are an RENXT user.  This is somewhat flawed because the Admins will have to remember to put up this attribute when setting up user accounts.


Any ideas?


Jeff Johnson

Karen Diener

Do you know how many RE users there are?  It is not difficult at all for the DBA to remove access - it's about a 30 second process.  I guess I'm trying to understand the rationale behind this - has security been neglected for a long time, or are there so many users that the communication is difficult?  An attribute doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  If the admin can add an attribute, they can just as easily add / remove user access.


It may be a procedure that needs happens separately from this data transfer.  I don't see any info on security, so don't think those are available yet.


Karen

Jeff Johnson

The problem is we are sometimes never notified that someone has left the university or they switched jobs.  We are interfacing with our HR system so we have the info for all staff (3,000+ employees).  We are just looking for a way to have the interface check to see if an employee that recently left the university or switched roles also has an RENXT account.  If so, notify the admins to investigate and take action, if needed.  Our RENXT users are spread all over campus.


Thanks,

Jeff

Karen Diener

Ah, yes.  That's very large scale and hard to just walk down the hall and ask around.


I am not aware of the availability of the user information in the API.  Hopefully someone from Blackbaud can chime in!


Karen

Karintha Marshall

Hmm....


Well if you keep the work email addresses of employees on the constituent records,  you could assign the work email to a new phone type exclusively for your org's employees.  


You can't make a SKY list based on Phone Types in RE NXT yet that I can see, but Phone Types are established entities in the Constituent API. 


It's not exactly pulling active users but it would give a clean list of all your employee constituent records in RE I think.  It would prevent adding another piece of data to maintain and if it works would only require a minor tweak to data entry procedure for employee records moving forward to maintain.


If you mark records for employees that have left Inactive you may be able to couple Active/Inactive status with the Phone Type criteria and then that would be all "active" users only.  


I did find it curious that there's no querying ability in NXT or RE7 specifically for application user accounts, but maybe I missed something...


Edited to add:  If it's preferred that you can see the list results before plugging it into an automated solution,  you could query for the new Phone type in Database View and load that into NXT as a static list.  I don't know if you can call a static NXT list in the API, but I'm guessing it should be possible because there's a List API.  The only caveat here would that you'd have to recreate/reload the NXT query every time a new employee records added to make sure it's up to date,  and the reload may require a remap in the API since technically you'd now have a new list for the API to reference.

 

Jeff Johnson

That approach may work if all employees had RENXT accounts, but that is not the case.  Less than 10% will have RENXT accounts.  So, without a user API or way to query NXT users, we will have to find a way to flag the NXT users' constituent records using a list friendly data element.