Behavior of Export Criteria changed?

Tracy Ricketts · March 2019

Melissa,

That would be great! I haven't opened a ticket as I was hoping to find a quick solution.

Thanks!

Anne Boudreau · April 2019

Melissa,

Could you have BB connect me to your case? On Friday, we noticed the same problem you're having when exporting constituent codes. It's always worked for us in the past and suddenly there's a problem.

Thanks!

Dan Sassenberg · April 2019

I am having the same issue, where putting the current date in "Start Date" is not providing the current assigned solicitor as it has always used to. I may have found a workaround - leaving Start Date blank, and ordering by Date From instead. I haven't had a chance to fully proof this, but after looking at a few it might be right.

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Anne Boudreau · April 2019

I started my own case on this problem of recent changes to how constituency codes and solicitors export. Like others, we could export the correct constituent code and the correct, current solicitor by choosing to export one instance of a code/solicitors and entering the current date in the Date From field. Within the last two weeks this stopped working and an export would have either an incorrect constituent code or no constituent code and, in the case of solicitors, a past solicitor with an end date entered. Here's the response I got from Blackbaud: "This is Ellie from Blackbaud Support. I'm writing in reference to case number 017149081, which we have open. I understand your frustration of it working one way and then stopping working that way approximately 10-14 days ago. With the recent update to the patch 14 improvements were made. The way you were previously using it was actually an issue in the system and in the recent patch was fixed. Going forward you will need to follow the steps in the article I had previously sent out to you (Knowledgebase Article 56070)." Support suggested adding a fix request to the idea bank asking to have the patch reversed in this specific case, which I'll do. Please vote for it!

Mark Guncheon 2 · April 2019

So what they are saying is the patch "fixed" something that was not broken and now, in order to get the patch corrected, you are encouraged to go to the idea bank and make the request there. I assume they'll want people to vote for it.

This makes no sense.

Anne Boudreau · April 2019

Exactly! How can you not have export functionality that allows you to output the current solicitor? Why the heck would I want to export past solicitors?

John Heizer · April 2019

Anne Boudreau‍ thank you so much for that update. I looked at the Patch 14 Change Log and found this cryptic entry (which makes no mention of Constituent Codes, which have also apparently been affected):

119624 Export excludes solicitors when filtering on Start Date

which has this page in the KB:
https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/119624

The KB they mention with the "solution" is here:
https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/56070

l'm going to need about 5 more cups of coffee to wrap my head around the "solution," but what I'm seeing at the moment I'm mostly going to be concerned with Scenario 3 (has a Date From, but no Date To), trying to export currently active solicitors as of today. Unfortunately I'm not seeing ANY way to get that out of the system, at least not in the examples they've provided. In Scenario 3 they only provide 2 conditions out of 9 that will actually return a Solicitor, both of which might include Solicitors that shouldn't be there.

Particularly distressing is if you filter on a Start Date that precedes the Date From the Solicitor will still be included, despite not yet having begun their assignment!!

I'm finding so many things wrong with this "solution."

What I really need is to be able to include Solicitors (and Constituent Codes) who were active on a specific date, not a Start/End range of dates. Blackbaud has made this far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anne Boudreau · April 2019

Support told me to create an Idea Bank entry so I did. Feel free to vote for RENXT-I-2201. While it may not technically be an NXT issue, I figured if I put the idea into the RE category, nothing would happen to it. Our staff is in revolt over this!

Wendy Whitmire 2 · April 2019

Anne - thanks for posting this. I can only imagine your frustration. We use the current solicitor for a variety of queries and reports and also in excel Pivot tables after we export the data. I guess this could be managed in Excel and maybe Crystal by exporting the start and end dates but that also requires resetting any reports you're already running. Since we are still self hosted I will definitely postpone installing this patch.

Dawn Cureton · April 2019

The link to Anne's idea is https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-2201! Please vote. I doubt it will do any good in time to prevent a lot of report-rewriting, but it's worth a shot.

Elizabeth Johnson · April 2019

Melissa,

If BB is still looking for others that have had this issue show up recently could you have BB connect me to your case? I think it has been a couple of months but this used to work beautifully.

Thanks!

Also Anne, I voted on the idea thanks for creating it.

Melissa Lide · May 2019

Thanks for this post and comments. We didn't notice a change until yesterday and I couldnt figure out what I was missing... yeah, sounds like it's what BB is missing.

We are hosted so the patch would have been applied, right?

How are people working around this for end of year letters?!

Melissa Lide · May 2019

BB provided me with this workaround this morning:
https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/51049

Create a new constituent query of the desired records.
Create a new constituent export and include the query created in Step 1.
On the Output tab, select Relationships, Assigned Solicitors, Name.
In the Criteria window, enter 2 in the Number of Assigned Solicitors to export field.

NOTE: Even if only one assigned solicitor is desired, at least 2 must be exported for the sort option to function. Otherwise, only the first one found will export.
Select the desired Solicitor types (if necessary).
In the Order By field, select Date Added and mark the Descending radio button.
Click OK
Click Export Now.

John Heizer · May 2019

Melissa Lide‍ thanks for that update.

I'll add some caveats to that solution provided by BB.

If you've added historical information to the record (found out that someone was a previous Solicitor but didn't add the information until recently) then Order By Date Added will return incorrect information.

If you export to Blackbaud Report Writer Database (MDB) format (which is what I need for custom Crystal Reports) then having that second Solicitor Relationship record could easily result in duplicate records being reported because of the one-to-many relationship created.

Lisa Theurer · October 2019

Have either of these problems been corrected yet? I also cannot get the correct solicitor to export, and the constituent codes are not correct either.

It is so frustrating when a solution that worked perfectly is broken, and not repaired.

thanks all,

Lisa

Elizabeth Perron · October 2019

Hi Lisa Theurer‍,

If you have followed the KB and the steps that Melissa Lide‍ provided above in this post string and are still having issues, please contact Support.

Elizabeth

Tracy Ricketts · October 2019

None of the solutions provided in the recent posts resolve the issues--still pulling older solicitors, only now all of my solicitor types don't seem to be working and the date added assumes a very simple and linear approach to relationships. This was previously a very functional area, now we are spending significant time and energy trying to pull reports with accurate and complete solicitor information. VERY FRUSTRATING.

Melissa Lide · October 2019

I've since changed to using primary solicitor which I did not want to do for plenty of reasons- however, in order to get more out of the NXT dashboards it was necessary,

I feel for everyone struggling with this - it was a big loss of time and not cool that it happened.

Elizabeth Perron:

Hi Lisa Theurer‍,

If you have followed the KB and the steps that Melissa Lide‍ provided above in this post string and are still having issues, please contact Support.

Elizabeth

Darrel Giesbrecht · March 2020

This issue has finally been corrected to my satisfaction. See KB #56070 dated January 31, 2020. This fix was in 7.96 Patch 18.
BTW, I think that 56070 has gone through several revisions. I could be wrong, but i think that there was one dated Feb 22, 2017, and possibly another in 2019, neither of which fixed the problem.

John Heizer · March 2020

Darrel Giesbrecht:
This issue has finally been corrected to my satisfaction. See KB #56070 dated January 31, 2020. This fix was in 7.96 Patch 18.
BTW, I think that 56070 has gone through several revisions. I could be wrong, but i think that there was one dated Feb 22, 2017, and possibly another in 2019, neither of which fixed the problem.

Sadly it still doesn't solve the need to be able to export a single current "Primary Solicitor" (with a start date, but no end date) without having to enter dates into the Export criteria every time. I need that functionality to automate Exports for end users and for custom Crystal Reports. The only work-around is to junk up the database with a "Former Solicitor" entry, which goes against the basic database architecture of the system. Yes, Patch 18 fixes their previously bad "fix," but doesn't solve the more fundamental problem of how RE performs the date range selection versus the output quantity limit.

Snigdha Verma · March 2020

I've had to update the solicitors to former. We upgraded to patch 17 and it created a huge issue. And 18 isn't fixing it as John mentioned.

Behavior of Export Criteria changed?

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