Deleted relationships notification

Warren Sherliker
Warren Sherliker
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® APIs
Hi,


Any chance we could have a Webhook or some other API endpoint to find deleted constituent relationships? We can see new or updated relationships but can't tell when someone deletes one. I can see several 'deleted' webhook endpoints but not this one so should be easy to add???


Cheers


Warren

Comments

  • Ben Wong
    Ben Wong Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    Hey Warren Sherliker‍,


    Yes, it's technically possible to have a webhook event for when a constituent relationship is deleted. However, as you probably already know, we don't have endpoints to retrieve deleted records. You will need to have your own store of data to get the details of the record that was deleted as we will only provide the ID of the record. Would that pattern work for you? Want to share more about your use-case? Feel free to email me if you want to share details.
  • Warren Sherliker
    Warren Sherliker
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Hi,


    Webhook is fine if that is available: Only providing the ID not perfect but we can probably work around that. Could you not provide the Constituent ID as well as the subrecord ID surely that is not giving away too much? It tells us which record needs refreshing.


    Anyway scenario: A client has multiple people linked to an organisation and because of that link they have access to an online portal.


    We can currently detect new links and edited links to the org (relationships) and sync those to the online portal. We can't detect when one is deleted unless we store IDs in a mid way table and do a bit of comparison of IDs etc. which is again storing data outside of RE that really doesn't need to be stored.


    As a more general question - can you provide the parent record id as well as the record id for webhook responses? That would help a lot. 


    Cheers


    Warren

     
  • Ben Wong
    Ben Wong Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    Hey Warren Sherliker‍, for some webhook events we provide the constituent ID but we haven't been doing that with the delete events. Since you can't get the deleted child record by ID, would the constituent ID on delete events still be valuable?
  • Warren Sherliker
    Warren Sherliker
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Ben Wong‍ Yes, the constituent ID would be really useful - we would refresh the profile for that person (which would pick up on any missing subrecords) and pass it to the external system. That is basically what we do for loads of the integrations we have written for clients. Refresh the profile and send it. If we don't know there is a change i.e. deleted subrecord then it is difficult to trigger the process. If the webhook had the main record ID and subrecord ID it makes it very easy. That applies to any gift based webhooks where custom fields, or notes etc. are deleted, having the gift ID would be great (just for future planning).
  • Warren Sherliker
    Warren Sherliker
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Ben Wong‍ Just as a case in point for including the constituent_id in the deleted webhook notifications. Look at the new Solicit code webhooks.


    Currently we could watch for new or updated solicit codes (BTW not sure how you update a solicit code as it is either there or not!) and from that we can see the constituent record and on the fly reimage that and push it to an external system.


    However, the deleted webhook does not include the constituent id - to do anything with the solicit code id we need to store the, sometimes millions, of solicit code records in a database with the associated constituent id and when a delete comes through cross reference them to find the constituent record to reimage. Obviously we are not going to do this - total waste of data storage...


    Please do include constituent_id in all the webhook responses.


    Cheers


    Warren
  • Ben Wong
    Ben Wong Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    Hey Warren Sherliker‍,


    Good points. Unfortunately, our implementation is somewhat determined by the underlying architecture of the products. After looking into this we found that we're not able to provide the constituent_id on these specific deleted events from RE. So we understand that some developers won't be able to use the deleted without having their own store of the data.
  • Warren Sherliker
    Warren Sherliker
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Hi,


    That's a bit unfortunate - TBH if we are going to go to the trouble of storing ids we might as well do the whole thing ourselves and not use webhooks.

    Are there plans to sort this out? Surely if you use DB triggers for this it should be easy enough to harvest the IDs on DELETE?


    Cheers


    Warren
  • Ben Wong
    Ben Wong Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    No plans to provide constituent IDs with delete events currently. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy path for us to do that.

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