Bye bye

I've got a new job, which no longer involves working with Netcommunity - so I think it's time to stop updating this blog. I leave this job in a few weeks but I will be busy between now and then sorting everything out, so this will probably be the last update.

I'll leave the blog online, for reference. Hopefully some people will find it helpful.

Thanks for reading!

Custom Donation Form

There is a good example on Blackbaud Labs of a custom donation form for Netcommunity. It's a good example that you can build on and use to create (for example) a shop feature for Netcommunity, or some other kind of custom part that can take payment.

A while ago I converted the code to C#. It worked really nicely - payment would be taken from a card, and the transaction sent into the Netcommunity plug-in in Raiser's Edge.

However, I noticed that if an invalid card number was entered and submitted, the 'Thank you for donating' message would still come up, even though the transaction was not processed and the money was not taken. This is the bit of code that deals with it:

try
{
BBNCExtensions.API.Transactions.Donations.RecordDonationReply oReply = this.API.Transactions.RecordDonation(oArgs);

}

There are a series of catch statements following this that are intended to catch any problems that might arise. None of them seem to catch an invalid card number or anything like that, though. This means that any code in the try statement will be executed, irrespective of whether or not the card has been approved, as no error appears to be thrown.

One way of checking whether the transaction has been authorised and it's OK to go on is by including this just after RecordDonation:

if (oReply.CreditCardAuthorizationResponse.ResultCode.ToString() == "Approved")

If 'Approved' is returned, you're good to carry on.

I'm not sure whether this problem is unique to us and our merchant (IATS), but this solution seems to have solved the problem.

Raiser's Edge Admin crash on Windows 7

Not Netcommunity-related, but it might be of help to anyone who encountered the same problem I did.

Since upgrading my workstation to Windows 7, Raiser's Edge 7.91 had started crashing every time I tried to open the Admin tab.

I tried running it in various different compatibility modes, as I assumed that the problem was being caused by Windows 7. What I forgot was that after installing Windows 7, I also installed the beta of Internet Explorer 9.

I ran a debugger on the Raiser's Edge crash and noticed that MSHTML.DLL was causing the crash - so I uninstalled IE9 and reverted back to IE8. That fixed the problem.

IE9 is a great browser, but it's not compatible with Netcommunity (particularly the text editor) and it also breaks Raiser's Edge on Windows 7. For now, keep IE9 away from Blackbaud software until they sort this out.

It's a shame, as it's a great browser, but clearly MSHTML has changed significantly enough to break Raiser's Edge.

Happy Christmas!

Just a quick one to say have a great Christmas and New Year.

Blackbaud Netcommunity store / shop

I know that some people have the Blackbaud Netcommunity e-store / shop module installed that Blackbaud created themselves. We asked about this a while ago, and were told it's soon going to be a free part of Netcommunity and no longer charged for.

That was nearly a year ago, with no shop in sight as yet.

My next tutorial, hopefully in the next few weeks, will go through how to create your own online shop by using the Netcommunity API.

I've created a shop module of my own that allows you to list items, take payment, and manage stock levels. It also sends all the details through to Raiser's Edge to be processed in the Netcommunity plugin.

Making your own shop can be as complicated as you want it to be - for the purposes of the tutorial I will focus on creating a simple online shopping basket, with a checkout that takes payment and sends the transaction through to RE. The best thing is, the Netcommunity API does all the tricky bits for you in terms of card processing and transaction processing - the rest of the shop's functionality is entirely up to you to create using ASP.NET.

Blackbaud Labs has an example of how to create a custom donation form that can easily be adapted to function as a checkout for a shop. If you take a look at that example it should give you plenty of ideas - it is in VB, however.

Most wanted custom parts

If you could create a custom part that could do anything, what would it be? What is your most wanted feature that BBNC doesn't have?

Blackbaud Netcommunity says no to IE9

Irritatingly, the Netcommunity built-in text editor doesn't appear to get on with Internet Explorer 9.

More specifically, every single time you click on anything within the text editor box it throws a Javascript error. Disabling Javascript is no good, as everything is so AJAX-ified it won't even let you save changes without JS.

This appears to be an issue with the text editor (Tiny MCE) rather than Netcommunity itself, but as a customer, that's irrelevant.

Please fix this Blackbaud. IE9 will be out of Beta before you know it.

Update

The only reason I'm commenting on this is because installing the IE9 beta automatically removes all previous version of Internet Explorer - therefore it's the only IE I have.

Blackbaud's CTO Shaun Sullivan commented on Twitter that he will look into it - thanks very much.