Are you seeing spikes in number of records returned on Constituent API

Ryan Hinz · March 12

I have been working with support for a while now about an issue where we are seeing spikes of records coming down in the Constituent API. The common theme with the spikes is the records share the same month/day in the birthdate. I am trying to push back on support, but they say everything is fine on their end. I found this old post from 2017, is the problem back again? Has anyone else see more records than expected with Constituent API? Whether you use Omatic or your own API calls.
Post from 2017: What makes a Constituent count as Modified? - Blackbaud Community

Alex Wong · March 13

@Ryan Hinz
my every 4hr sync of data warehouse have no issue syncing constituent (iterative sync) and nightly (full sync) using the constituent list API endpoint https://developer.sky.blackbaud.com/api#api=56b76470069a0509c8f1c5b3&operation=ListConstituents with last_modified

A little more info on what you mean by “spike” will help. using last_modified “can” have some constituent record be downloaded again if constituent records are updated since the start of the sync,

Ryan Hinz · March 13

@Alex Wong,

Here is the history this month of what Omatic (using the API) is bringing over to Luminate.

3/11 - 24k
3/10 - 14k
3/9 - 13k
3/8 - 13k
3/7 - 25k
3/6 - 37k
3/5 - 62k
Nothing completed on march 4th becuase it ran all the way to March 5.
3/3 - 18k
3/2 - 58k
3/1 - 106k!!!

Data flowing from LO to RE over the same days:

3/11 - 2k
3/10 - 798
3/9 - 871
3/8 - 1k
3/7 - 1k
3/6 - 1k
3/5 - 1k
3-4 - 4k
3/3 - 1k
3/2 - 1k
3/1 - 3k

Alex Wong · March 14

@Ryan Hinz
Looks like you are not having issue with SKY API. Are you using Omatic Cloud? or IOM?

Without knowing more of what you use or what you are doing, hard to say why there is “spike”. But I'm pretty certain has nothing to do with SKY API constituent list.

Ryan Hinz · March 14

@Alex Wong , yes we are using Omatic Cloud. There are 2 issues going on, from what I have seen. One of them I found yesterday and fixed…so starting tomorrow we should see an improvement, hopefully. However, I have a custom script (outside Omatic Cloud) to pull data straight from the API and I just ran it for today and there are 198 people celebrating their birthdate today (3/14) and the API response is saying they were all modified this morning. All of them were modified at “2025-03-14T00:14:20.875-04:00” I spot checked the records and all of them have not been modified in months. So yes, that is not causing the spike, but it is still a problem that Blackbaud needs to fix. The API response should be accurate with the modified date and from my view nothing changed for the record to be modified in the list.

Alex Wong · March 14

@Ryan Hinz
Glad you found and fix one of the issue

Regarding your 2nd issue, please read this documentation

https://developer.blackbaud.com/skyapi/docs/in-depth-topics/api-lists#fields-affecting-date-modified

While in DB view property, the record wasn't updated, it is “updated” in the RODS b/c of nightly birthday check that increment “age” info on the RODS.

If your script is doing “incremental” update, keep in mind that's not fully accurate as it doesn't take into consideration of records that has been deleted, so depending on what your script is doing, the constituent data table that your script is updating is outdated

Ryan Hinz · March 14

@Alex Wong, this is more helpful than what blackbaud has provided! It is sad to see age increments. I guess that makes sense since the API has “age”. I feel like that is a data point they don't need to include in the API, we can all do math.

In regards to deletes, I am aware of that. In situations where we use the API outside Omatic, we do a full re-sync every Sunday to account for that.

Are you seeing spikes in number of records returned on Constituent API

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