SKY API Sandbox Environment / Sample Database

Damon Oram
Damon Oram
Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
in SKY Developer General Discussions

Hello, I am new to the community so Hi!

The university I work at currently has Raiser's Edge and we will soon be starting a project to move over to NXT. I know that I will need to rebuild my current interfaces using the SKY API and I just wanted to get ahead of the game and start writing and testing some GET requests. It may be many months until we actually get a real environment based on our data so wondered if there are any endpoints provided by Blackbaud that currently point at sample/test data which I am able to utilise in the meantime? Thank you

Damon

Comments

  • Chris Rodgers
    Chris Rodgers Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Hey Damon, it sounds like you might be a good candidate to make use of the SKY Developer Cohort Blackbaud Environment. This is a shared developer sandbox with read-only access. You can request access to the Raiser's Edge NXT SKY Developer Cohort sandbox. More information is in the “Sign up for an API Subscription” ? section of our documentation on making your first API call. (Simply a request over email at the moment)

  • Damon Oram
    Damon Oram
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks for the reply Chris. Ive sent the request email. Tell me…. Is it possible to send API requests to the sandbox using something like Postman or a custom .NET application…. or is it purely done via the console? Thanks

  • Chris Rodgers
    Chris Rodgers Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    No problem, Damon. After you get access to the Cohort environment, you'll be able to authorize any of your applications against that environment (via OAuth 2.0). Once you do that authorization and have an access token, you'll be able to make your API call through whatever means you'd like (including Postman). More info - https://developer.blackbaud.com/skyapi/docs/applications/createapp

  • Damon Oram
    Damon Oram
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thank you for your responses Chris. I just have a couple of questions if I may…

    • I am trying a basic constituent search using the inbuilt console and the request

    but unfortunately Im getting a 404 RequestNotFulfilled message. I am generating the token and supplying my subscription key. Could this be because I havent been authorised yet to use the console? I sent my email yesterday.

    • I am looking to write a console application without an interactive front end in order to sync data from RE NXT to our student system. Ive been looking at the solution skyapi-headless-data-sync which looks very good. Im presuming this will allow me to manage the authorization token without any user input? Also, can I use the solution in conjunction with the SKY developer cohort sandbox?

    Thanks

    Damon

  • Chris Rodgers
    Chris Rodgers Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    • I am trying a basic constituent search using the inbuilt console and the request

    but unfortunately Im getting a 404 RequestNotFulfilled message. I am generating the token and supplying my subscription key. Could this be because I havent been authorised yet to use the console? I sent my email yesterday.

    That URL appears to be for the Get Constituent endpoint. Is it possible that your environment doesn't have a constituent record with an ID of 280? If not, you would receive a 404. FWIW, if you're authorizing the console against the "SKY Developer Cohort 1" environment, record 280 exists (Robert C. Hernandez), so I wouldn't have expected a 404. If you weren't authorized at all, I would have expected a 401 (Unauthorized) response. If your user account didn't have permission to access record 280, then I would have expected a 403 (Forbidden).

    The Constituent Search endpoint is at https://api.sky.blackbaud.com/constituent/v1/constituents/search. If you're still not having luck, you can call the Constituent List endpoint just to get an idea for which constituent records you have access to.

    • I am looking to write a console application without an interactive front end in order to sync data from RE NXT to our student system. Ive been looking at the solution skyapi-headless-data-sync which looks very good. Im presuming this will allow me to manage the authorization token without any user input? Also, can I use the solution in conjunction with the SKY developer cohort sandbox?

    As long as you're able to authorize (OAuth) your headless app against a Blackbaud environment and get an access + refresh token, you should be able to plug that refresh token into that skyapi-headless-data-sync sample and have something you can automate. Yeah, definitely, that includes the SKY Developer Cohort environment as well (just keeping in mind that the Cohort itself is still read-only).

  • Damon Oram
    Damon Oram
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
    Hi Chris, thanks for the reply. At the moment, I dont have access to a cohort environment - which I think is the root of all my issues. Ive emailed skyapi@blackbaud.com but still no reply. Do dont know how I might be able to progress this do you?


    Thanks
  • Chris Rodgers
    Chris Rodgers Blackbaud Employee
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Hey Damon, it appears that you accepted your invite to the SKY Developer Cohort yesterday. Let me know if you have any issues.

  • Damon Oram
    Damon Oram
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Hello Chris

    I now have access to the cohort environment and have already written the initial part of my first test application which takes the refresh token (provided from my initial postman call to my app) and makes subsequent calls to obtain an access token (saving tokens to the database for reuse).

    Im currently calling the API for the constituent list for recently modified records.

    So far, so good.

    Thanks for all your help.

    Damon

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