What?
An article on something that has taken me several days to get working: Get Zoho Books or Zoho Inventory that when an invoice is marked as paid, update 2 custom fields with the Payment Method, and the Payment Date.

Why?
This was requested by a customer and the problem happened in that the workflow would simply not trigger when the invoice was paid.  The customer had added 3 custom fields: Payment Method, Payment Date, and Last Four Digits.  They needed these because sometimes their customers needed to know what card they had paid with (if paid by card).  The customer wanted payment method and payment date to appear on the invoice.

How?
This sounds rather straightforward, write a function that given an invoice, checks the customer payments and updates the custom fields.  Executing the function this worked as expected.  Now put it on a workflow where the settings were:

• When an invoice is "Created or Edited"
• Execute the workflow when "When any field is updated"
• Filter the triggers when Status is "Paid"
• Just once or every time is "Everytime"
• Actions is a custom function called "fn_invoice_updatepaymentmethod"

But this wouldn't work despite being as per the documentation (see sources below).

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What?
An article on one of my first client scripts for ZohoCRM. This retrieves and populates an email field based on when a contact is selected in a lookup field.

Why?
I could do a normal automation/workflow on save of the record, but the client wants the email to be prefilled in the field as soon as a contact is selected.

How?
This needs to behave like a formula field which changes and displays before saving the record. At time of print however, I can't get a formula field to retrieve a field from another CRM record.

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What?
This is a quick article to re-enable desktop notifications after having been prompted initially and having clicked on "Not Now".

Why?
I'm not sure when this prompt is supposed to prompt you again. A client of ours had accidentally clicked on "Not Now" instead of clicking on the "Enable". Documented below is how to get this to prompt you again.

How?
This largely depends on whether you are using the Google Chrome web browser. In this case version 100 and is correct at time of print.

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What?
A quick article on a code snippet to mark a package as shipped and delivered in Zoho Inventory.

Why?
As usual, any task like this that takes me longer than an hour, I'd like to document for future use. The use-case is the client has their own delivery drivers and want them to mark a sales order & package as shipped and delivered.

How?
Here's a code snippet that works for me.  It is triggered when a user ticks a decision box in Zoho Creator (on iPad displays as an on/off switch).  My connection here called "jl_inventory" has the minimum required scopes:

• ZohoInventory.salesorders.READ
• ZohoInventory.packages.READ
• ZohoInventory.shipmentorders.CREATE
• ZohoInventory.shipmentorders.READ

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What?
A quick article on how to upload an image to the product/item listing in Zoho Inventory.

Why?
We're enhancing the out-of-the-box integration from eBay to Zoho Inventory bespoke for a customer. We want the photo on eBay to be downloaded and uploaded to the Zoho Inventory record for the respective record. As Zoho Books and Zoho Subscriptions uses the same database tables as Zoho Inventory, and there's more documentation on the API for Zoho Books, we're going to apply this solution to Zoho Books.

How?
We're not going to go into detail on how to parse an eBay response here (see my other articles on eBay webhooks). Instead, all we want is the URL of an image to be downloaded, then uploaded to the Zoho Inventory or Zoho Books item record.

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What?
Well known by most but this serves as a quick reminder to myself and anyone else on how to embed a form or a report into a Zoho Creator page.

Why?
Cos

How?
The below is a template snippet for a Zoho Creator page. We set the parameters of the form/report. Then this shows how to embed using a DIV layer which allows for CSS styling. The last part shows how to embed using an IFRAME tag which isn't great for CSS styling as you can't do cross-dom acoss child iframes; but it does let you use OpenURL(v_Url, "iframe", "iframe_name") which is good if you have multiple iframes on a page and you only want part of the page to display different content dynamically or on click of a button:

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What?
This is an article documenting the process of publishing a Zoho Inventory image to eBay's Picture Hosting Services (EPS).

Why?
Because I couldn't find any other article in the whole world wide web that had a working solution. My use-case here is that I have built an eBay integration between Zoho Inventory and... eBay. Out-of-the-box, and at-time-of-print, Zoho Inventory only syncs eBay one way, in other words, listings on eBay get downloaded to Zoho Inventory but not vice-versa. Then there's an added delay of 4 hours. Then item specifics in eBay's listings don't get parsed into custom fields in Zoho Inventory... and the list goes on. So in my job, we tend to create a few custom functions which will download any item from eBay to Zoho Inventory and vice-versa. Easy to make the function to push an item to an eBay listing (see my other articles for this). But we also want to push an image from Zoho Inventory to eBay.

How?
Again, there is a caveat in that the subscription you have or your client has, needs to be Zoho One. Because we're going to use Zoho Creator as a middleware. Just to add to the pain, I'm going to make my function in Zoho CRM:

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What?
A super quick article on how to download an attachment from CRM and upload to a "file upload" field in Creator.

Why?
My use case here is that we are creating a Creator app that will show the attachments on a CRM contact record (and be clickable). The complication here is that the user can use the Creator form to add a new attachment that will eventually be uploaded back to CRM.

How?
At time of print, things have moved on and based on the Zoho official forums, this used to be a daunting task. Not anymore at least from what I've seen.

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What?
Another article on styling a radio group to become a weekly calendar carousel. In that a radio group displays the days of the week with arrows allowing the user to select the next or previous week. This is a follow on from my other articles on restyling Creator: Zoho Creator: Change Radio into Tabs and Zoho Creator: Decision Box into a Button.

Why?
We can't include JavaScript in a ZohoCreator app without building a JS Widget or using Nodejs... Or we can make do with the tools provided. The brief was similar to the Zoho Bookings interface where their Creator app is to present the user with the days of the week which they can then click on to select a particular day. Some navigation is required in the form of a left arrow and right arrow to see previous or next weeks respectively.

What I have:

What I want:

How?
This was achieved using some CSS and then some Deluge for the functionality. Let's dig into the CSS and then I'll explain how we made this functional.

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What?
Following on my article of creating a task using Zoho Deluge and scheduling a call using Zoho Deluge, here's an article on creating a Meeting or an Event using Zoho Deluge.

Why?
Because at time of print, I couldn't find that much information on how to build up a JSON request to create a meeting (previously known as Event) in Zoho CRM. Here's a quick snippet of code to remind me.

How?
Similar to how to create a call or task, but with some variation:

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What?
This is an article which is the updated version of my article Zoho Deluge: Push Item to Shopify API for 2022 using the new policy that Shopify have implemented when creating a custom app.

Why?
My use-case scenario here is that we have a Zoho Creator app which comprises of a custom quote builder that staff use to store details about a product, and then to push that product out to their Shopify store with a pre-built description, tags and inventory details. This means the app needs to be able to sync all of its products, customers, and orders with Shopify as a 2-way integration as the Zoho app needs information from additional apps installed on the Shopify store.

Why upgrade to the latest version for Shopify when private apps created before February 2022 won't be deprecated? Because the previous version was limited by our ability to search by product SKU. The new version, taking advantage of GraphQL, will be able to search by SKU and retrieve the correct product ID, variant ID, and inventory ID from Shopify.

How?
The below details on how we set up an access token in Shopify using the new process.

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What?
So this is a pretty cool feature in Zoho CRM that I hadn't used much but definitely worth an article. The ability to block field picklist options from being selected based on the profile of a user.

Why?
There were several alternatives we considered beforehand which still didn't fit the requirement: A client's first-line agents would have a lead record with the status "New Lead". The client wanted that if the status had changed to something else, the first-line agent would not be allowed to set it back to "New Lead". Automations and workflows could however (run as Administrators). Mapping a dependency field didn't fit the bill because we want "Lead Status" to be displayed to the first-line agents. Making this field read-only to first-line agents also wouldn't help as some of the options should be selectable. Two separate fields weren't quite right either: 1 as read-only (permission only to higher level) and 1 picklist as selectable means that the first-line agent would be referring to 2 status fields and not really knowing which one defines the stage the lead is at.

How?
Well this can be done through a validation rule. After working in Zoho CRM for over 3 years, this is the first time I'm using it so I'm documenting it.

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