Inconsistent Errors when trying to get Education custom field list

Mitchell Williams
Mitchell Williams
Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® APIs

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently experiencing an issue when trying to get education custom field data from this endpoint -

For some reason it only works about half of the time I try to use it, and it's not consistent in when it works or not, as sometimes it will work for a certain Constituent but then not work for that same Constituent another time.

The error I get when it doesn't work is just ‘The requested operation could not be fulfilled’.

I'm looping through a list of Constituents and for each one, getting their Education List and then attempting to hit this endpoint for each Education record in this list, and it seems to be roughly every other call that fails.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Mitchell Williams
    Hi, a little hard to get to the bottom of a problem in your flow without actually seeing your flow's action's input and output.

    One possibility is when you are “using” the custom field's value, that you are “assuming” the value to be of certain type (integer, text, etc). As custom field can have different data type, processing different data type's value all in the same way can hit errors.

    Though, as I mentioned, it is best you provide the action that failed, along with the input output info to the action and any expression that may be used in the action in order to diagnose the problem

  • Mitchell Williams
    Mitchell Williams
    Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Alex Wong

    Hi Alex, so I'm calling this endpoint from a C# application. Starting with a list of Constituent IDs, for each one I'm calling the Get Constituent endpoint to get their Constituent record, then getting their list of Education records using https://api.sky.blackbaud.com/constituent/v1/constituents/{constituent_id}/educations. These two steps work fine.

    What I'm then trying to do is take the Education ID(s) from the list of Education records and try to get a list of custom fields for each one using the endpoint mentioned in my initial post. I don't think it's anything to do with the type of the custom field because I'm not making any assumptions around the type, I'm just trying to get a list of the custom fields in a JSON format.

    Hope that makes sense.

    Thanks,

    Mitch

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Mitchell Williams
    If you can paste your c# code here, can help troubleshoot for you.

    From what you are saying.. a few error handling situation to look out for (in case you don't already have it handled:

    • get education records: is it possible that a constituent has no education record therefore the json array is empty (depending on your code, if you using a “for” type of loop, maybe it will just bypass the array if none is found
    • get education custom fields: is it possible that the education record does not have any custom field?

    Again, having code to look at will help. Otherwise, you can try to log the output from each API call to the system log (response code, and body message) and see where exactly is failing and the last call's details

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