No "like" or "starts with" operator available in event or fund queries?

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James Andrews
James Andrews ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Have you guys noticed this? Is there something I'm missing?



I'm trying to query for a bunch of events.  We have our event IDs set up by fiscal year and program.  So in theory if I want to find all Associates events for the last three FY, I should be able to say Event ID like 2013-AS*, 2014-AS*, 2015-AS*, or in other words, Event ID starts with those terms.



But there's no comparing operator. And when you choose "one of", rather than providing you a list, you have to look up each even individually.  And I'm talking about 84 events here.



I just had to go and write a SQL query to return the system record IDs for these events so I could use the copy/paste trick to query on them. Or, at least, it seems like I had to do that. Am I wrong?
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  • Gina Gerhard
    Gina Gerhard ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    James - I think there was a similar recent thread going around about how to pull certain types of events into queries.
    • One of the suggestions was to consider adding an event attribute that would clearly categorize your events.
    • It looks like that's what you're actually asking - give me all the 'AS' events and event date greater than xxxx.
    • So you could create an event attribute like 'Event Category', have the 'AS' value and assign to all your 'AS' events.  
    • Then very cleanly in an event query you can request to pull all the 'AS' events.  
  • James Andrews
    James Andrews ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic

    Gina Gerhard:

    James - I think there was a similar recent thread going around about how to pull certain types of events into queries.

    • One of the suggestions was to consider adding an event attribute that would clearly categorize your events.
    • It looks like that's what you're actually asking - give me all the 'AS' events and event date greater than xxxx.
    • So you could create an event attribute like 'Event Category', have the 'AS' value and assign to all your 'AS' events.  
    • Then very cleanly in an event query you can request to pull all the 'AS' events.  



     

    Gina, I'm gonna be honest: I haven't looked it up, but it might have been me who started that thread.  I feel like I have noticed this before, and possibly complained about it before.  And sometimes I forget what I've posted.  Sigh.



    But that said, how are you going to add an attribute to 84 events?  One by one?  You'd probably want to use global add, right?  But you can't do that unless you have them in a query. And you can't query for them, because of this issue.  I guess you could export all your events and query for what you want outside of RE and then use import...



    Anyway, I guess you're right, and for the people who don't have access to RODBA or the back end of our database, I guess I should set up an attribute system so they can query like this.  But this sure seems to be some pretty basic functionality that's missing.













     
  • Barbara Schlichter
    Barbara Schlichter ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    If you select Event Description contains AS*, will that work for you?
  • James Andrews
    James Andrews ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic

    Barbara Schlichter:

    If you select Event Description contains AS*, will that work for you?

    Sadly, no.  A lot of our events don't have descriptions.  Name and Event ID are the two fields I really have to work with here.



    On the bright side, I wrote a SQL query that recreates my export, and I can report off that in Access.

  • Matt Page
    Matt Page ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    James I think the post that Gina was referring to was the one I started the other week, which you can see here:



    https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/161/16064



    It's maddening isn't it? There are a couple of tips in the above thread, and I guess with setting up an Event Attribute it might be quicker to import from Excel, but, as you say, it's odd that what seems identical functionality to the rest of RE isn't available here. I mean, not even wild cards!?!



    Matt
  • James Andrews
    James Andrews ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic

    Matthew Page:

    James I think the post that Gina was referring to was the one I started the other week, which you can see here:



    https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/161/16064



    It's maddening isn't it? There are a couple of tips in the above thread, and I guess with setting up an Event Attribute it might be quicker to import from Excel, but, as you say, it's odd that what seems identical functionality to the rest of RE isn't available here. I mean, not even wild cards!?!



    Matt

    Thanks Matt -- I totally missed that thread, and I'm glad I read it.  I was going to postulate about it being the fact that event or fund name/ids are fields in a record rather than entries in a table, but I see John pointed out that assigned appeals -- and fund codes when you're filtering for them outside of a fund query -- give you the option.  I bet he's right that it's because Event was third party software that they integrated.



    All in all, my conclusion from taking some time the last two years and learning more about the back end of RE and SQL in general, is that RE's query functionality is even more limited than I had previously realized, but if you can get to the back end you can often get what you want pretty easily.  

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