Find Unused Table Entries

Ann Johnson
Ann Johnson
Third Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

I'm working on clean up project with our Majors. Does anyone know how to “easily” figure out which entries are not being used? If I could just delete those, without having to run individual queries that would be awesome.

Comments

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge: Product Update Briefing Feedback Task 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Hi @Ann Johnson - Welcome to BB Community! The easiest way I can think of to do this, is to go directly to the table list in configuration and try to delete it. If the entry was used anywhere in the system, the system will prevent you from deleting it.

  • Ann Johnson
    Ann Johnson
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Austen Brown Yep..that's what I was doing. Do you think I could use the Delete Table Entry Plugin? You can ask it to delete all table entries. However, it says that it will give you an error for any and all that have a record attached to them. Would it be crazy to do this process to delete the unused ones? My theory is that it would only delete the ones that are empty, which would solve part of my issue. Too risky?

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge: Product Update Briefing Feedback Task 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    Hi @Ann Johnson - Because the KB for this says “Please ensure you have removed the table entry from all records in your database before attempting to run the Delete Table plug-in” (Article 109175) - I would err on the side of caution, and go manually, one-by-one through the tables.

  • Steve Townsend
    Steve Townsend
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    The problem I've had doing this is that there have been some table entries, which RE says it can't delete because they're used in a record, but I haven't been able to find them as they're not used anywhere we normally use the table. There are some that I've never been able to find.

  • Alan French
    Alan French
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    I don't think this applies to the Majors table, but be aware that SOME tables will let you delete entiries even if they are in use. Anecdotally this seems to be the ones that were originally text fields and we have changed to lookups.

    @Steve Townsend do you have any examples of ones you've been unable to find? Maybe the community can come up with some suggestions! ?

  • Steve Townsend
    Steve Townsend
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    Unfortunately not, I haven't done this for a while and didn't keep a list.

  • Jaclyn Whitelock
    Jaclyn Whitelock
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 2 PowerUp Challenge: Product Update Briefing Feedback Task 3 First Reply

    A bit late to this discussion and I don't have a solution- but I just wanted to say that I've also encountered this- table entries that say they're being used, but don't show up in queries, etc. Maybe someday I'll stumble across the reason in trying to fix something else (generally how most of my “aha” moments happen!) but I haven't yet.

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