Connect to Raiser’s Edge NXT Sky APIs to obtain information about constituents/donations in a BI tool called the Jet Data Manager

Chase McCuddy

We are attempting to connect to Raiser’s Edge NXT Sky APIs to obtain information about constituents/donations in a BI tool called the Jet Data Manager.
The connection in use is a REST API ADO.net connector. Documentation on how to use that connector is located here: http://cdn.cdata.com/help/DWE/ado/

We have the primary and secondary Access Key that we’re using as our Access Token in the API connector.

We’ve already created an application in the RE environment, and authorized that connection, which provides us with the following info:
Application ID (OAuth client_id)
Application Secret (OAuth client_secret)
 
To start, we are simply attempting to obtain any information out of the RE: NXT system to verify this connectivity works at all. We’re starting with Address information as that seems relatively straight forward.

Here’s the main body of the connection information for OAuth:
 


When we click the Authorize OAuth button without the refresh information, it fails. So, we entered the same *existing* access token, and then used the provided refresh URLs from the documentation: https://oauth2.sky.blackbaud.com/token.
 
We never get a popup, but it does provide a different error.
 
Ideally, we’d like to get on a phone call/screen sharing session with someone familiar with the API connectivity to help us determine if this is something that we’re just missing a couple of steps on or what we need to do next. We can follow up with the connector vendor once we have this discussion and further investigate, but we first need someone at Blackbaud to help. I attempted to open a support ticket with Blackbaud and was pointed here. 


Thanks to anyone who is able to provide help/insight on this. 

Chase McCuddy

Apparently the image I tried to link in the last post didn't come through. Here it is: 


 

Chase McCuddy

I wanted to try to follow up on this to see if anyone would be able to assist. Any ideas?

Chris Rodgers

Hey Chase,


Sorry for the delay in responding to your question. I'll do what I can clarify a few things, but I'm not familiar with the tools that you're using here (Jet Data Manager or the ADO.net connector), so keep that in mind.


I am curious what kinds of errors you're seeing. That might help inform the discussion. But without that information, I think I can point out a few things.

• When you say "*existing* access token," how did you obtain that access token. From your description of the issue, you aren't able to negotiate the OAuth Authorization Code flow. If you haven't gone through the flow, then you wouldn't have an access token. You might be confusing the OAuth access token with your SKY API subscription key (found here). The subscription key is not needed to authorize your application, but once you successfully get an OAuth access token, you need that subscription key to make API calls. More information about subscription keys
• Your screenshot shows an OAuth "Callback URL". Looking at the documentation for your connector, this sounds like what the OAuth 2.0 spec and our documentation refer to as the "Redirect URI" (redirect_uri in both docs). These Redirect URIs are endpoints within your application that understand how to exchange the Authorization Code for an access token (this exchange is covered in our tutorial). While it's not obvious to me looking at your connector's documentation, the tools you're using may already understand how to negotiate the Authorization Code flow and provide you with a redirect_uri/callback URL (many tools & vendors understand OAuth and provide this). If they do, just make sure to configure your application with that Redirect URI on your app's detail page.  In any case, that callback URL is definitely not `https://oauth2.sky.blackbaud.com/callback` (a URL that doesn't exist on our OAuth 2.0 service).
• If the tools you're using don't provide you with a Redirect URI, you can view some of our code samples and app showcase to get you started with writing an endpoint to do this. If you're looking for a codeless solution, you can take a look at our Microsoft Power Platform docs; there is quite a bit of documentation there to get you started, including some recorded webinars that you can view on demand.

Hope this helps. I understand this can be a lot of information if you're just trying to get this one solution to work, especially if your org has already invested heavily into it. Let us know whether this helps, and feel free to message me privately if you need to confirm details about the errors you are seeing.

 

Jeff Mazerski

Chase did you ever get the CDATA connection to work with RE NXT?