Did Someone Say Open Platform?
There are a couple of new and very cool things posted over at Blackbaud Labs regarding the Blackbaud NetCommunity API. The release of BBNC v5.5 later this month will include a further expansion of the open toolset.
"Lot's of effort has been put into expanding the API into new areas of the platform, primarily around giving the Custom Part developer much more access to core platform features like RSS feeds, Document Libraries, built-in dialogs, donations, user accounts, and programmatic part creation, to name just a few." - Michael Andrews, Blackbaud Distinguished Engineer
The open platform capabilites in BBNC have been native and haven't required any additional cost for clients to use since the product was first released in 2004. These new changes, additions, and improvements should help developers currently using the BBNC platform and those that plan to in the near future. To get a little bit more information about what's new I went straight to the source. Here's a little Q&A between me and Michael Andrews:
Q: You noted that a change in the BBNC Open Platform is improvements to the object model names and structure. Can you talk about how this should help developers already using BBNC to build custom parts?
A: Consistency and discoverability mainly. Growth of the API will be more organized
Q: I noticed that the Transaction Property is now built-in to BBNC v5.5. How does that help reduce the development time to build custom donation transactions?
A: For BBNC v5.5 we are supporting recording real donation transactions as if they were recorded by our donation form part. This means you can create your own donation form, process it (credit card, debit, pledge etc) via the API and have it recorded for you. It will show up in RE / eCRM as if it were from one of our donation forms. You no longer have to define a custom transaction for it, nor create a custom transaction processor in RE for it, and all the other mumbo jumbo that goes with those steps.
There is even an option to pre-fill “donation transaction object” with the current user’s bio data which you can use to pre-populate your custom form – so it eliminates the Custom Web Method you would have had to create to go get that data from RE as well. AND if that’s not enough, you can design an email template providing custom merge fields (and the donation fields), that can be sent as the acknowledgement email. The thinking there is it seems likely that if you were doing your own form (say for eShopping) you may want to include what they bought in the email. There is a similar set of functions around creating new users and the corresponding built-in signup transaction. Very useful if you wanted to easily associate getting a user account w/ your custom part, very common in an eCommerce world.
Q: What was the goal behind opening the Custom Server Controls? Will this continue to grow in the future?
A: The idea there is to allow custom programmers access to common UI elements to use in their parts like selecting/uploading images, queries, funds, summoning a part’s editor, the HTML editor, etc. This allows your part to do some real powerful stuff and feel more like its built in. Yes, lots of potential to add more like this. These components safely wrap up the internal javascripts and server-side business logic for some otherwise complex code.
Q: There are a couple of Blackbaud developed custom parts available for download. Any hints at what might be released next?
A: Demos of all the new stuff. Donations, adding users, RSS feeds, document management, DIV based menu, breadcrumbs, good times.
Look for more things to be posted on Blackbaud Labs in the near future.
Update: Here's a link to a review of the changes posted on the Customizing NetCommunity weblog.