Create RE Actions from a Single Excel File

Wil Alveno

I am trying to wrap my brain on how to get this done… I need to create actions for ID's listed on an Excel file located on a One Drive shared folder or SharePoint whichever. It seems simple enough but I do not see any resources on a starter point for this. Any ideas or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Austen Brown

@Wil Alveno - You'll need to start with an action that directs the flow to locate the file in question, or for the more dynamic option you can set up the flow to trigger when a new file is added to a specific folder. From there its pretty straight forward to create the action in RE NXT.

Wil Alveno

@Austen Brown - Yes I figure that the flow would do that, my inquiry really is on the nature of the file being found and having the RE ACTION created from rows or IDs in the Excel file.

Austen Brown

@Wil Alveno - The data will come into the flow by row. Once you get the content from file you'll be able to designate how to use it with in the flow. I recommend using the constituent's system or look-up id; from there you can locate a corresponding constituent record and go through the steps to create an action.

Alex Wong

@Wil Alveno
basically, you will do the following in your flow:

• List rows present in a table action in Excel Online (Business) connector
• Apply to each body/value of List rows present in a table action
  • Use Get a constituent by lookup ID in Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT Consittuents connector to get the constituent's system record id
    • If your excel has Constituent System ID already, then you can skip this action
  • Use Create a constituent action in Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT Interactions connector to create the Action record on the constituent
    • fill in the details you want on the action
      • Assume you want the same action details (i.e. Type, Summary, Note, Status, etc). Otherwise, if action info differs from constituent to constituent, then have these info in the excel files as columns of info to be used in the Action record

As you can see, the flow is rather simple.

If you have a LOT of consituent needing to have action added, you can even adjust the Settings on the Apply to each action, and turn On Concurrency Control, and set the Degree of Parallelism to 8 or 9. (Blackbaud has for most customer an API limit of 10 API calls per second, so don't go above this number to avoid error). But turning on Concurrency allows your flow to run 8-9x faster.