Zoho - Joel Lipman .Com

Zoho CRM: Get Unique Values of a Text Field

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 08 October 2021; Hits: 16801

What?
This article demonstrates how to return a list of unique values in a particular field in a CRM module.

Why?
My use-case is a data-migration where the records exist in a staging module in CRM but I want to transform/translate one of the column values into the target

How?
So this is my plan:

Setup a connector to CRM with the scopes ZohoCRM.coql.READ and ZohoCRM.modules.ALL
Build up a SQL query, or more specifically, a COQL - CRM Object Query Language
Try using distinct on a single-line text field
Adapt the query for unique values in a lookup field

Zoho Books: Display Sales Order Shipping Address on Package Slip

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 07 October 2021; Hits: 2266

What?
I probably won't forget this but just in case I do, this is an article to explain how I got the shipping address from a sales order in Zoho Books into the template of the Package Slips.

Why?
It took me a while of playing about with the placeholder reference fields in the template before Zoho advised on a 'hidden' away setting which was key to changing what these display.

What I had:

copy raw

${CONTACT.CONTACT_DISPLAYNAME}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_ADDRESS}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_CITY}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_CODE} ${CONTACT.CONTACT_STATE}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_COUNTRY}

${CONTACT.CONTACT_DISPLAYNAME}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_ADDRESS}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_CITY}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_CODE} ${CONTACT.CONTACT_STATE}
${CONTACT.CONTACT_COUNTRY}

and in my Sales Order:

copy raw

BILLING ADDRESS          SHIPPING ADDRESS
-------------------      -------------------
Test Company             Joels PO Box
1 Test Street            1 Different Street
Test City                Another City
Test State Test Zip      Another State Another PostCode
Test Country             A different Country

BILLING ADDRESS SHIPPING ADDRESS
------------------- -------------------
Test Company Joels PO Box
1 Test Street 1 Different Street
Test City Another City
Test State Test Zip Another State Another PostCode
Test Country A different Country

But the packing slip would display the Ship to address as the same as the billing address... Or more specifically, the primary contact, company, address and phone from the customer record and not from the sales order change.

How?
The key is a setting you need to change by going to Settings > Preferences > Packing Slip Settings > and Enable "Delivery To":

Category: Zoho :: Article: 775

Zoho CRM: Upload a Product Photo using Deluge

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 27 September 2021; Hits: 3766

What?
A quick article to remind me on how to upload a photo using CRM API v2. Yes it's documented and yes it still confuses me now and again. So I'm writing this to remind me and to keep reminding me of how to do this.

Why?
My use-case is that I have a photo in Zoho Creator but the source doesn't really matter as the part I struggled on was uploading it to CRM. I want to update the photo in the CRM record.

How?
So we have to do the usual which is download the photo using invokeUrl then we set the paramname not to attachment but to file. We then use another invokeUrl to upload the photo to CRM:

Zoho CRM & Zoho Books: Get Books Currency and Tax IDs

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 24 September 2021; Hits: 1940

What?
A quick note for when I want to quickly generate maps of a currency or a tax from a client's Zoho Books.

Why?
The use-case here is that we are creating a Sales Order in Zoho Books from Zoho CRM and want to map the correct currency and tax by their ID numbers.

How?
Using the REST API and InvokeURL in Zoho Deluge to look at Zoho Books. This uses up an extra 2 calls so you could run them once, store them as a map on your function if you don't want to use up these 2 every time your sales team push a CRM Sales Order to Zoho Books.

ZohoCRM to ZohoBooks: Please ensure that the shipping_address has less than 100 characters.

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 22 September 2021; Hits: 2789

What?
An article to note something I didn't realize I needed: How to address the above error and how to update a Shipping Address for a specific Sales Order in Zoho Books.

Why?
You might think the following request to create a Sales Order in Zoho Books would be enough:

copy raw

{
  "date": "2021-09-08",
  "zcrm_potential_id": "123456789012345678",
  "currency_code": "GBP",
  "reference_number": "Salespersons Test Reference",
  "terms": "These are our test terms and conditions",
  "customer_id": "234567890123456789",
  "payment_terms": 30,
  "salesperson_id": "345678901234567890",
  "line_items": [
    {
      "item_id": "456789012345678901",
      "discount": 0,
      "quantity": 1,
      "description": "A test product description"
    }
  ],
  "shipping_address": {
    "address": "Test Street",
    "street2": "Test Street 2",
    "city": "Test City",
    "state": "Test State",
    "zip": "Test Postal Code",
    "country": "Test Country"
  }
}

{
"date": "2021-09-08",
"zcrm_potential_id": "123456789012345678",
"currency_code": "GBP",
"reference_number": "Salespersons Test Reference",
"terms": "These are our test terms and conditions",
"customer_id": "234567890123456789",
"payment_terms": 30,
"salesperson_id": "345678901234567890",
"line_items": [
{
"item_id": "456789012345678901",
"discount": 0,
"quantity": 1,
"description": "A test product description"
}
],
"shipping_address": {
"address": "Test Street",
"street2": "Test Street 2",
"city": "Test City",
"state": "Test State",
"zip": "Test Postal Code",
"country": "Test Country"
}
}

However, if you try forcing the billing or shipping address in you should get the following error:

Please ensure that the shipping_address has less than 100 characters.

How?
If you get the above error, the community forums will advise you to get the ID of the Shipping Address...

Category: Zoho :: Article: 772

Zoho Deluge: Calculate Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds between two Timestamps

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 21 September 2021; Hits: 6862

What?
A very quick article to calculate the time between two timestamps and break it down into days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Why?
I've done this in lots of other systems but here's one in Zoho Deluge.

How?
We're going to make use of the .toLong() function applied to a datetime datatype variable which will return the Unix seconds.

Zoho Creator: Receive eBay Order Notifications via Webhook

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 20 September 2021; Hits: 3103

What?
This is an article to document how I got a client's eBay to notify the seller every time a buyer bought a fixed price item. This uses the Trading API even though I'm aiming for the Platform Notifications API...

Why?
A follow on from my article Zoho Creator: Push to eBay Listings. I have a Creator app that needs to receive the orders from an eBay account as soon as the order or transaction is made on a Fixed Price item.

How?
So first of all, you'll need an access token: please visit my article and read the first part on how to get a valid Access Token for the rest of these steps. Once we have an access token, we will check what notifications already exist (if any), and then we will create a function that subscribes the application so that any order is sent to a URL, specifically a CRM REST API function that will forward the payload data to Zoho Creator (Yes you will need CRM version Enterprise or Zoho One [that supports functions] for this process).

Zoho Creator: Prevent Endless Loops On User Input of a Field

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 19 September 2021; Hits: 2835

What?
This article serves as a best practice and reminder to myself on how to stop endless loops from happening in Creator and crashing the application. This is more for complex Creator forms which have workflows triggered from many deltas/changes.

Why?
Some clients have referred to this as the "spinning circle of death": they load up a Creator application or change a field and there will be a spinning icon indicating that the field has triggered an automation/workflow but it keeps spinning and doesn't stop. The app page will ultimately timeout and when reloading the form it simply displays a blank page. Their only workaround is wait about 30 seconds or more for the loop to automatically cut out and then they can use the interface again only to find it may crash again.

Zoho Creator: Prevent Endless Loops On User Input of a Field

In the background and from a developers understanding: field1 is told to update field2 when field1 is changed. When field2 is changed, it is told to update field1. This causes a recursive or endless loop where each field triggers an workflow/automation, even if the value has not changed, to modify another field and vice-versa. This can get more complex when there are a lot of fields in the mix.

How?
I'm using this article to go through various methods I tried to prevent this from happening:

Zoho Creator: Push to eBay Listings

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 12 September 2021; Hits: 2209

What?
This is an article to document how I connect a Zoho Creator app to push a product to your eBay listings. By writing this article, I can refine this method as it took me a while to figure out.

Why?
I have a client who has a Zoho Creator app and wants to push their products to their eBay account. Previously using Zoho Inventory, we realized that this only syncs 1 way not 2 as per the documentation. In that items sold on eBay sync to Zoho Inventory by means of an eBay Sales Order, and only every 4 hours. We needed something that pushes out to eBay and updates the eBay listing. To complicate matters, the client also uses Shopify which means that when an item is sold by eBay, it would take 4 hours until all systems were aware. 1 customer buying the item off eBay and another customer buying the same item off Shopify would be problematic if the client only has 1 of the item in stock. See my Shopify article to get a webhook response within 5 seconds.

How?
At the time of print, the Trading API of eBay is deprecated and reaches end of life at the end of this year (2021). In this demonstration, we're going to use the Listings API, follow the OAuth 2.0 process to get an access token and use it to create an eBay listing.

Zoho Deluge: Push a value to a datetime field in CRM

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 10 September 2021; Hits: 2266

What?
A very quick article to show pushing the date and time to ZohoCRM or ZohoCreator.

Why?
You may have received an error that goes something like:

datatype: datetime

How?
Here are some formatting examples:

Zoho CRM: Standard Setup for Tax Rates

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 02 September 2021; Hits: 3717

What?
This is an article for training purposes. I'm pretty sure there is official documentation on how to do this but I thought I'd write this article to make it simpler for new developers to follow and learn as a quick point of reference.

Why?
Some clients systems will presume that they don't need their sales or CRM users to think about tax and probably manage it in Zoho Books leaving it to their finance team. This is a quick run-through for a standard setup to include UK tax/vat.

How?
Here's a quick step-by-step to follow:

Zoho CRM: Permission Denied for Quote Conversion Mapping

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 02 September 2021; Hits: 2692

What?
A really quick article for anyone experiencing the same issue: As a super admin in CRM, I am denied permission to access the Quote Conversion Mapping page...

Zoho CRM Issue: Permission Denied for Quote Conversion Mapping: the Error

Why?
I wanted to map a billing street 2 and shipping street 2 from the Account module to the Quote module, then on convert, to map these to the Sales Order in CRM. As my client's sales team would only create sales orders in CRM and don't use the invoice module (that's for their finance team using ZohoBooks), we disabled the CRM Invoice module.

How?
Therein lies the reason. For the quote conversion mapping, it needs the CRM Invoice module as well.