Renaming phone types in Raiser's Edge - and finding queries that use them

When you integrate Raiser's Edge with Outlook you automatically get several new "phone" types such as: E-mail, E-mail 2, E-mail 3 and Business, Business 2, Business Fax.

If, like us, you already have some phone types then that's annoying. I've found that you can't change the mapping of outlook to RE types, so if you don't want too many phone types you have to convert your existing ones to the Outlook ones. Mapping them is a future suggestion. (Here's something I found recently: if something in the Blackbaud knowledgebase starts with "unable to..." then it will always list something that's a suggestion.)

Converting the phone types on the records is fairly straightforward using "Table Cleanup". The hard thing is (and this applies to any field, not just phone types) finding which queries use the types, so that you can modify them to use the Outlook types. However I've found a way:

First of all you need the code of the thing you're looking for. We have an email type "Email - private" and I want to convert that to "E-mail". So first of all you fire up the SQL query editor and put this in:

SELECT TABLEENTRIESID
FROM TABLEENTRIES
WHERE LONGDESCRIPTION = 'your description'

Make a note of that number - you'll need it.

Then you want to find all your queries that use that field. Now the phone type, like some other fields, can be used in two ways. You could have criteria such as

Phone type equal Email - private

or

Email - private Number not blank

Here's how to find the query names that use the field on the Criteria tab:

SELECT
Q2.NAME "QUERY NAME"
FROM QUERIES2 Q2,
QFILTERFIELDS QFF
left join QFILTERVALUES QFV on QFV.QFILTERFIELDSID = QFF.QFILTERFIELDSID
WHERE
QFF.QUERIESID = Q2.QUERIESID
and (instance = 40nnnn or numericvalue = nnnn)

I've used nnnn to represent the number you found out in the first query statement above. The 40nnnnfor us would be 403027. For some reason the instance has a 40 at the front.

Here's how to find query names that use the field on the output tab:

SELECT
Q2.NAME "QUERY NAME"
FROM
QSELECTFIELDS QSF,
QUERIES2 Q2
WHERE
QSF.QUERIESID = Q2.QUERIESID
and (instance = 40nnnn )
order by q2.name

The BT API and the cheeseshop

BT has an API. I like this sentence in the documentation:

If you look at the readme that comes with the Python SDK, you'll also notice a cascading dependency from ZSI to PyXML, which is available from the cheeseshop.

A wiki of Christian networks

More of a bookmark for me, but in case it's useful for you:
A wiki of Christian networks.

Cows and Colonialism

I recently heard a paper which had been delivered previously at the Global Connections Thinking Mission Forum

Here is a summary of the paper given by Rogelio Prieto (summarised by an unknown author), along with another one given by someone else. It's a sustained metaphor on how "the British church (standing here for all Western ‘sending’ countries and their mission agencies) is a COW".

It's best to read the summary, rather than hear my summary of the summary, but here are some quotes to get you interested. (Bear in mind these are the unknown author's quotes from the original talks.)

Indeed if you are in need and as long as you look from a distance, the British church looks very cow-like – big and fat and promising, with irresistibly tender eyes.

If you’re in need and find a cow, you don’t study it...you milk it.

Good Samaritan video

We have a steady stream of volunteers here at the Wycliffe Centre, who stay for 6 months or so. The group that are mostly leaving this week (with help from other people) produced an up to date version of the Good Samaritan story.

Megavoice - solar powered Bible

I've written about the Megavoice before, and I had a look at one today.

It's made out of quite robust plastic, with the solar panels in the back. The controls are pretty straightforward - on/off, pause, and then three pairs of skip forward and back buttons. They are three different sizes and the bigger ones skip further (to the next chapter, say). It's a very useful way of getting the Bible in people's hands.

Facebook first/third person confusion

Paul Morriss is finding that I'm confused which person to use in my Facebook status messages.