Create RE Actions from a Single Excel File

Wil Alveno · March 2023

I am trying to wrap my brain on how to get this done… I need to create actions for ID's listed on an Excel file located on a One Drive shared folder or SharePoint whichever. It seems simple enough but I do not see any resources on a starter point for this. Any ideas or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Austen Brown · March 2023

@Wil Alveno - You'll need to start with an action that directs the flow to locate the file in question, or for the more dynamic option you can set up the flow to trigger when a new file is added to a specific folder. From there its pretty straight forward to create the action in RE NXT.

Wil Alveno · March 2023

@Austen Brown - Yes I figure that the flow would do that, my inquiry really is on the nature of the file being found and having the RE ACTION created from rows or IDs in the Excel file.

Austen Brown · March 2023

@Wil Alveno - The data will come into the flow by row. Once you get the content from file you'll be able to designate how to use it with in the flow. I recommend using the constituent's system or look-up id; from there you can locate a corresponding constituent record and go through the steps to create an action.

Alex Wong · March 2023

@Wil Alveno
basically, you will do the following in your flow:

List rows present in a table action in Excel Online (Business) connector
Apply to each body/value of List rows present in a table action
- Use Get a constituent by lookup ID in Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT Consittuents connector to get the constituent's system record id
  - If your excel has Constituent System ID already, then you can skip this action
- Use Create a constituent action in Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT Interactions connector to create the Action record on the constituent
  - fill in the details you want on the action
    - Assume you want the same action details (i.e. Type, Summary, Note, Status, etc). Otherwise, if action info differs from constituent to constituent, then have these info in the excel files as columns of info to be used in the Action record

As you can see, the flow is rather simple.

If you have a LOT of consituent needing to have action added, you can even adjust the Settings on the Apply to each action, and turn On Concurrency Control, and set the Degree of Parallelism to 8 or 9. (Blackbaud has for most customer an API limit of 10 API calls per second, so don't go above this number to avoid error). But turning on Concurrency allows your flow to run 8-9x faster.

Anna Warner · March 17

@Wil Alveno @Austen Brown @Alex Wong, I decided to create my first PA flow (also a first for our org) for actions to import from an Excel file and am using this thread to help me deal with the error message I keep getting. I have been tweaking this for days. I can't seem to figure out what is wrong though.

PA in my tests keeps telling me in my "Create a constituent action" step that it is "NotFound" I didn't have the "Get a constituent by lookup ID" step that is listed in this thread, but that has been added and seems to be working. The error is a 404 error with the raw message of "The requested operation could not be fulfilled". Copilot is a bust for help at this point. I am at a loss. Just thought since you all commented on this before that maybe you could help with this. Thanks for any pointing that could help.

Alex Wong · March 17

Adding constituent action requires the constituent system record id, not Constituent ID (another name for this is Constituent Lookup ID). That is where the "Get a constituent by lookup ID" comes into play. I can only assume your excel file's "ID" column is Constituent ID. So first thing to check is what ID do you have in the excel file. The easy way to tell is, if you go to the constituent record in RE NXT, the ID in the Constituent Summary tile is the Constituent Lookup ID, the ID (number) in the URL of the browser is the constituent system record id.

Erik Leaver · March 17

@Anna Warner drop in today's Automation User Group at noon ET & the group can help you walk though this.

Anna Warner · March 17

I was in the call. (FYI…this is all a foreign language to me.) I got some ideas on fixes between things that were said and what @Alex Wong said above that I was testing and started making some progress. However, now in my test file of 3 actions, 2 are going in and one is not. I have switched each field in the row that isn't going in to match a field on one of the rows that is going in (one by one) and it still isn't working. I even moved that whole row to a different position in the list. Still not working. What could be the issue? Any thoughts?

Create RE Actions from a Single Excel File

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