Escaping Wildcard Characters in Raiser's Edge

Scott Denney · June 2015

Hi Everybody,

I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to query for things like an asterisk (*) in a field. The obvious issue that you run into is that this is a wildcard character and is not interpreted as a literal character. Normally when dealing with regular expressions (regex) you can escape the wildcard characters using a backslash (\\), however, the Raiser's Edge treats the backslash as a literal. Does anyone know if there is an escape character that works in the Raiser's Edge?

Matt Page · June 2015

I don't know if it works, but in some other software usin a caret (^) works. Have you tried that?

Matt

Steven Cianciarulo · June 2015

I ran into this issue at one point and was told by support that you cannot query for the presence of an asterisk. At a previous job we put ***BAD ADDRESS*** in the address block to mark a bad address. To get to those records, I ended up querying all addresses and sorting to get to those that began with asterisks.

It might be worth calling support again though, this could have been fixed since then.

Patti Hommes, bCRE-PRO · June 2015

I also hope there is an answer to this! I have been cleaning up the Add/Sals in my inherited database and there are a couple in Config that have asterisks added as a text field. I can't delete because they are present in records, and I can't find them to change them.

roger berg · June 2015

I agree with Patti that trying to find those elusive instances of a salutation (or phone type, or whatever) so that you can delete it is really frustrating! Make sure and check everywhere - run a query including the thing you're trying to find and on your output include contacts, spouses, drill down through all the relationship types - and eventually your query will return a result (or two) so that you can change the record and then finally delete that pesky salutation or whatever it is you're trying to fix.

Good luck!

Kelsey Hilton · June 2015

Hey all!

While there is no way for us to actually query on addresses or other fields that contain wildcards in a standard query, there is a fun workaround for this. You can actually use Globally Change Records to basically run a global change on records with wildcards - but without changing anything. When you do this, you can choose to create an output query of records. So this changes nothing on the records, but finds them all and then places them in the output query. I always make sure to recommend that you have a backup of your database when running a global change, even when we're not actually changing anything - just in case an errant click happens

Here's a Knowledgebase solution on how to query on constituents whose address contains wildcard characters, which contains all the steps you'll need. (If you're nervous about it, you can always include a query with one constituent in the global change and then walk through those steps just to see how it works.)

I hope you guys find this helpful! Thanks all!

Kelsey

Christine Cooke 2 · June 2015

Patti Hommes:

I also hope there is an answer to this! I have been cleaning up the Add/Sals in my inherited database and there are a couple in Config that have asterisks added as a text field. I can't delete because they are present in records, and I can't find them to change them.

something I have done to find those pesky records in Add/Sals is to go into Config and add a very obvious flag to the add/sal that you are trying to find/purge, I add the Constit ID to the front of that particular add/sal. That way, when you search they are easier to spot, and you can search on constit id -- or if you happen to open a record it is obvious it is one of the ones you have been searching for.

Escaping Wildcard Characters in Raiser's Edge

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