Service Pack 36 and Gender

Kelli Crispin
Kelli Crispin
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud CRM™ General Discussions

We are getting ready to take SP36 at UNC Chapel Hill. We have heavily customized CRM and are looking to hear from others who have taken SP36. We have the What's New notes for SP36, but want to know if there were particular Gender field and code table issues found that were not mentioned in the documentation, issues with customizations, or any other lessons learned.

We will likely not allow the SP to automatically populate every record with the new gender value and write our own code to do this, since we have a large data base, and we trust our own code over BB's. ? Has anyone else had issues with the automated updates in the SP or have you written your own updates?

Comments

  • Jeff Garmon
    Jeff Garmon
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Hey Kelli. UGA deployed SP36 in May and let the BB code populate the new gender values during deployment. The only issues we encountered had to do with some customizations, but we had not really expanded much on the base gender functionality that BB offered:

    1. We had to update a handful of customizations to reference the new code tables, basically think some automated gender assignment processes based on known or existing data elements. Nothing crazy, just things like these processes would automatically revert a gender after specific changes.
    2. We have a series of custom audit reports that track specific biographical changes for QA purposes based on who made the last change. That report was deemed useless for the month of May simply due to the gender change entries being logged for every record during deployment. Instead of asking the team to revamp those reports for this one time event, we simply decided our May gender QA reports would be out of scope for the purposes we utilize them for.

    I haven't heard of any other challenges around the transition.

  • Kelli Crispin
    Kelli Crispin
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Jeff Garmon Thank you for the vote of confidence to go ahead and deploy the SP and populate the gender values. Our DBA deployed 36/37 in a lower environment yesterday, and it didn't really take that long, even though we have 2M+ individual constituents that were updated. I have a few questions for you or others who have taken SP 36:

    • Were you able to find a way to prevent the trigger from making it look as if every constituent had a change? After deployment, every individual had yesterday for Date Changed and our DBA's account as the change agent. I know technically there was a change, but it's effectively invisible to the user, and it doesn't truly reflect a change from one gender value to another. Our data entry folks (and myself) will not be too happy to have the Change Date and Changed By User reset on 2M+records to the date we deploy the SP. Rick Root (my boss) didn't think it was possible, but he said to see what the community says.
    • Did you find that code that used the GENDER field did not need updates? I'm seeing some places where GENDER was used, and the listbuilder/query are fine, but the ones that used GENDERCODE are the ones with issues.
    • I see that there are 4 batch templates updated in SP36, and Constituent Batch gets updated in SP38. Will the Constituent Batch not work at all, or can it be used if you only use the 4 old gender values?
  • Matthew Handelman
    Matthew Handelman
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1

    @Kelli Crispin - we're in the middle of implementing the SP36/Gender stuff. We're also pretty heavily customized, so there was definitely a bit of retrofitting for our customizations, especially because this SP does not include moving the new gender codes to the BBDW.

    We let the SP install routine handle updating the gender (not that we had a choice). To your question about it updating the DateChanged on the Constituent record - I hadn't thought about that - we're still in testing, so we haven't moved the SP to production yet - I'll have to mention this to my team, but I don't think it's going to be an issue for us.

  • Matthew Handelman
    Matthew Handelman
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1

    @Kelli Crispin - I think I remember reading somewhere that we shouldn't be looking at the old GENDER column anymore - it was updated during the SP install, but I don't think there's code that will update the GENDER column based on changes made to the GENDERCODEID column via the UI. So if you have custom datalist, listbuilders, form extensions, queries, etc. that are looking at GENDER, those need to be repointed to GENDERCODEID.

  • Rick Root
    Rick Root
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Matthew Handelman One of the other things I noticed is that Blackbaud didn't add the gender code udpate to the new constituent batch, only the constituent update batch..

    They also added a trigger to update the GENDERCODE when GENDERCODEID is updated.

    So basically, any mismatches are going to be because some process inserted or updated GENDERCODE without handling GENDERCODEID. I wrote a global change to monitor for mismatches and then update GENDERCODEID as appropriate.

    That said, that will only work until we have added new gender codes, which I don't think we're going to do right away, at least not until after SP38.


  • Rick Root
    Rick Root
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Matthew Handelman yeah I looked at the table spec. The GENDER column is still a calculated field based on the GENDERCODE column.

    Fine if you keep GENDERCODE and GENDERCODEID in sync.

  • Mary Short
    Mary Short
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Kelli Crispin, the ELCA just deployed SP37. We were previously on SP35. We also have several customizations and custom external applications that integrate with CRM's gender field. The Constituent Batch not working with the new gender values was an issue, but we worked around it for now. We also let the upgrade process populate the new gendercodeid field.

    Please feel free to contact me if you want to discuss further. Thanks! Email me directly at mary.short@elca.org.

  • Matthew Handelman
    Matthew Handelman
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1

    @Kelli Crispin - something interesting I discovered this morning: the SP37 installer creates the new GENDERCODE table, and populates it with Male, Female, Other, and Unknown. What I didn't know was that the ID for each of those will not be the same on each installation/environment - the ID for Male on your system will be different than the ID on my system. They also included a GENDERCODEDEFAULTMAPPING table that normalizes that by being a crosswalk between the 0-3 GENDERCODE values and the new GENDERCODEID fields.

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