Articles

Zoho Deluge: Handle Commas between Quotes in a CSV (and New Lines)

What?
This is an article to demonstrate how to handle commas in a CSV file that were enclosed between two double-quotes. I've added to this the handling of new lines or carriage returns in between a pair of double-quotes.

Why?
Our use case is that we were trying to loop through rows of a CSV file which contained addresses which in turn contained commas. Saving this as a CSV and asking Deluge to parse the data in the appropriate columns was not working as expected.

How?
The quick answer is a regex that will replace any commas between two quotes with a custom string, to be exact:
v_FormattedData = r_Data.replaceAll("(\"[^\",]+)[,]([^\"]+\")","$1|mySpecialComma|$2",false);

ZohoCRM: Process all records of a module

What?
A quick article to document a method of looping through all the records of a module and processing these with the ability auto-resume without processing the same record twice.

Why?
Whether you have a few hundred records, or a few hundred thousand records, we sometimes want to write a function that will check each record and mark it so that the process doesn't repeat on records that have already been checked.

Some solutions have worked in the past where you could simply add a checkbox and do a search where this value is false; but lately this hasn't been working for me. To this end, I have thought of an alternative that I now use frequently in client systems.

How?
The gist is that we add a checkbox called "Processed" which will have a datatype Boolean. Our function will then loop through each record and do what it has to do. The workaround here is that we order this by modified time. When the checkbox gets updated, this modifies the record and puts it at the bottom of the list.
Xero API: Send Multiple Invoices

What?
A really quick article for anyone who got stumped by the same issue: How to send multiple invoices to Xero in one API call?

Why?
Our use-case is in Zoho Deluge which couldn't generate more than 5 invoices in a scheduled task because Xero only allows 5 concurrent connections at one time... And Zoho was trying to send about 7 at a time (as in schedule created 7 Zoho invoices but only 5 Xero invoices). Our solution: Send all Zoho invoices in API call to Xero... apparently it can accept up to 60 invoices in one call.

How?
Crazy simple solution, your JSON needs to have the key "Invoices" and the list of invoices to create:
{"Invoices":[... list of invoices ...]}
Zoho CRM & Zoho Books: Custom Related Lists Deluge

What?
This is an article to quickly demo a couple of snippets of code to display values in a custom related list as well as to display empty custom related lists.

Why?
Because I keep forgetting how to do this and it takes about an hour to go through the documentation and get a working solution.

How?
So the article below shows how to do this Zoho CRM and how to do it in Zoho Books...
ZohoCRM: zoho.crm.searchRecords only returns certain records

What?
This is an article to hopefully resolve for you quicker than it took me, why a zoho.crm.searchRecords() returns some of the records but omits others.

Why?
The use-case was that we were creating a custom related list on a Zoho Finance > Sales Orders module but it wasn't finding all the Quotes related to this Sales Order.

How?
The quick answer is buried in Zoho documentation and due to the searchRecords function requiring it's 5th parameter which defaults to "not converted" records:
<variable>=zoho.crm.searchRecords(<module_name>,<criteria>,<page>,<per_page>,<search_value>,<connection>);
Zoho Creator: Two submit buttons on a non-stateless form with 2 different redirects

What?
This is an article to document how to have two submit buttons on a non-stateless form which both submit the form but one leaves the current record open while the other redirects to the reports view.

Why?
A client wanted a "Save" button on their form as well as a "Save & Close" button. The "Save" button would submit the form but keep the user on the record form. The "Save & Close" button would submit the form and then redirect the user to the report view of the records.

Zoho Creator: Two submit buttons on a non-stateless form: Result

Sounds simple but you can only set a form to redirect to one link and adding a HTML anchor link (<a href>) to the page won't help as you need to submit the form before redirecting the user.  A HTML <input type=submit> element to the page won't help either as you need to redirect the user to the specified report after submitting the form.

How?
Well as always, I'm going to cheat. My solution here was to simply repurpose a decision box field in Creator; then re-style it to look like a button; then add a workflow on click of this field.
Zoho Creator: Assign an integration field value with an integration value

What?
This is a quick article to help anyone encountering this gotcha: I have an integration field, if someone changes it, I want to save the value to the record immediately.

Why?
If you try to update an integration field via deluge with another integration field or even the same integration field, it will return an error
Unable to update the value to r_RecordDetails.Account. Line:(442)

How?
It is written in the documentation albeit difficult to find: an integration field returns an ID as a string. If you want to assign it to an integration field, you have to convert it to a number with .toLong().
Zoho CRM & Zoho Creator: Query returns some fields missing other data on the record

What?
A super quick article to demonstrate how an idiot like myself can misread the documentation. This particular article shows you how to customize the search results or response from using zoho.creator.getRecordById().

Why?
My use case scenario is that I was trying to build a related list in Zoho CRM with a view on to related records in Zoho Creator. For some reason, only some random fields were being returned, all pretty much useless to me. Well the "for some reason" turned out to be because my detail view on the report was displaying a report/document template.

How?
The quick answer is:
Add the fields you want to the detail view of the report you are accessing.
Zoho Creator - GetRecordByID or SearchRecords missing data - Quick Answer

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Joel Lipman
www.joellipman.com

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