Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
The Merit Badge List field of the “Download the current mbc.csv file” is not always sorted. The behavior appears to be that the list is sort when it is first created, but badges added at a later time seem to go at the end of the list.
I would be more useful if the badge list returned in the download was always sorted by badge name. This would provide a consistant order for badges and would allow simple string matches to test for when/if the list of badges for a counselor has changed. As it is today, the list must be parsed and an item by item compare made to see if there are any additions or deletions of badges.
Amen, brother!
Especially since the upload is persistently buggy, we need to vet the download, and this would be a big help.
(I still dream of uploading a set of “MemberID,Badge” pairs. Maybe include the name just as a double check. The current format is a real nightmare, everyone has to manually build or code their own parsing tools.)
I have created an Excel workbook that compares the uploaded to the downloaded file. It uses a WrodCount macro to count the number of words in the Badge list and compares that against the number of words in the downloaded file. While that is not sure to find any differences, it catches most of them.
