Is there any mechanism within Raisers Edge to pull Constituent IDs based on the contents of a csv file or Excel spreadsheet?  I have a situation where my users have been using Excel for years to track solicitations.  There are thousands of records and many of the records might be for constituents already in the system.  I want to query RE to return all of the Constituent IDs for the names in Excel.  Is this possible from within the system?

I can load the names into another table and run an SQL query to relate the data, but I'd rather not go that route if there is already a solution with RE.

There's no way to do that (easily) from within RE.  But a simple solution would be to export ALL constituent ID's (and whatever other matching field you'd need) and do a simple matching query in Access.

What field are you using to "match" the names in your CSV file?

Regards,
Joe

Joe,

Thanks for the reply.  I figure that I will just create a temporary table with SQL and populate it with the first name and last name values from the CSV.  Once I've done that it should be pretty easy to join to the RE constituent table and then perform a look up against it.

Why do you suggest using Access?  The benefit I can see would be skipping the step of having to figure out the underlying RE data structures and authentication mechanisms.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your question, there's quite an easy way to do this...it's called creating a query from a data file. Check out the KB solution #BB124766. I use this function DAILY - it works great.

Hope this helps! 

Tracie,

Thank you for your reply.  I am trying to do the exact opposite of what that solution is about.  I have a list of names and I am trying to look up the related constituent ids.

Ahhh...in that case maybe David Zeidman's plugin might help - see this string http://forums.blackbaud.com/forums/p/7322/26606.aspx#26606