[DrewAllen]

I just finished the VBA/API class for RE. This is the second time that I have taken this class. I seemed to grasp things much better this time around. I think that there are a number of reasons for this. I won't go into them here.

I decided to try my hand at this so that my skills wouldn't get rusty. We'd had a couple of projects on hold, because they would require some VBA. I decided to start with the easiest of these.

In the Raiser's Edge, you can make some fields mandatory. We wanted to make the first name mandatory on constituents, but setting this in RE also makes it mandatory on individual relationships. This caused problems, because we did not always know both of the first names when there was a couple, but we wanted to use the spouse's title when creating Addressees and Salutations.

In brief, make the first name mandatory on individual constituents, but optional on non-constituent individual relationships. There are actually two parts, both of which are very similar. The first was when creating constituents and the second was for changing a non-constituent individual relationship into a constituent. I used the "RE Code Wizard" to create a Constituent_BeforeSave() event and an Individual_BeforeSave() event. I then replaced the

 'bCancel = < place your custom save criteria here >
 

with the following code:

        bCancel = _
            oConstituent.Fields(RECORDS_fld_KEY_INDICATOR) = bbKeyIndicator.bbki_INDIVIDUAL _
            And oConstituent.Fields(RECORDS_fld_FIRST_NAME) = ""
            
        If bCancel Then MsgBox "The first name is required for constituents!"
 

There are two conditions: I first have to check to make sure that the record is an individual (and not an organization) and then I have to check whether the first name is blank. If it meets both of these conditions, then I raise a message box with the error.

The Individual relationship is similar, but I already know it is an Individual, what I need to check is whether it is a constituent.

It works beautifully.

Drew