Cohort Enviro Limitations

Steven Cinquegrana
Steven Cinquegrana
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® APIs

Can someone please point me to some doco, etc that details the differences between the developer cohort RE NXT enviro and the production one?

For example, when creating a Constituent List, I see no way to add an email contact field, whereas they are visible via the Constituent Summary field. So the info is there, it's just that the ability to add email address fields - or any contact fields such as phone - appears to be missing.

This is important for our app testing. Knowing what is and is not representative of the live enviro would be very useful.

Thanks.

Steve Cinquegrana | CEO and Principal Developer | Protégé Solutions

Comments

  • Michael Tims
    Michael Tims Blackbaud Employee
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi @Steven Cinquegrana, I'll chat with our internal Blackbaud team about adding a section/page to the SKY API docs describing the difference in access developers can be granted in the Dev Cohort environment. There's no docs describing the levels of access today.

    For the Constituent List, I'm not finding a way to split out some of the contact information (phone, email, etc…) into separate columns for any of my production environments, so I believe that just can't be done for the Constit list.

    There's no difference in functionality that's enabled in the Dev Cohort instance, at least when it comes to the various APIs the environment supports - it is also a production environment. The key difference is the level of access we provide to developers to the functionality within that environment. In general, most devs just get read-only access. Some devs, upon request, get some level of write access (but not delete). This would be helpful to document what those levels of access are - that's great feedback. Thanks!

  • Steven Cinquegrana
    Steven Cinquegrana
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Michael Tims Thanks for your reply. I must be wrong, but I thought it was possible to include that info in the List fields. Specifically, we need an email address.

    So would the recommended flow for getting a list of constits along with email addresses from a Constituent List be to:

    1. Create a Constituent List including the Constituent Lookup ID (I don't see the Record ID as being available).

    2. Pull the list then parse it and use the Lookup IDs to individually pull the additional email address information using the Constituent Search endpoint.

    I'm kinda hoping that's not the only flow available to be honest as it would be very laborious and call-quota-heavy.

    Can you tell me what your thoughts are?

  • Michael Tims
    Michael Tims Blackbaud Employee
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Hey @Steven Cinquegrana, we might be talking about 2 different ways of creating a Constituent List. I know my way around the Constituent API, but certainly not an expert. I can get someone to chime in if needed.

    Here's what I'm doing:

    1. Create a Constituent List

    2. Then use the List Constituents API to fetch the list I just created providing the “list_id” query parameter

    • The returned list of constituents from this API does have a separate “email” field returned in the data

    Let me know if this helps or if you're doing things differently in the product or API. Thanks!

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