Articles - Joel Lipman .Com

Windows OS: Alt Codes / Symbols / Special Characters

: Joel Lipman; Windows OS; 03 June 2021; Hits: 4827

What?
This is a simple article to demonstrate how to type special characters not found on your keyboard or on a Qwerty UK/US keyboard layout.

Why?
Being able to type international characters from other alphabets is necessary when dealing with languages other than English. Preserving files in unicode or utf-8 encoding will help but there will be times when you have lost the formatting and get weird question mark characters instead such as: .

How?
Ensure you are using the numbers on your numeric keypad and NOT the numbers at the top of your keyboard for the following steps. Also check that you have "Num Lock" on/enabled. Typing a special character is 3 easy steps:

Hold down the ALT key (preferably the one on the left of the spacebar and not the Alt Gr often found on the right of the spacebar)
then press the numbers in the numeric pad (while still holding down the ALT key),
then let go of the ALT key.

Remember: This will not work with the numbers at the top of your keyboard unless you are on a laptop and can apply a function lock (fn) and the numbers on the right of your keyboard are enabled.

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 17 May 2021; Hits: 8408

What?
This is a quick article documenting how to update custom fields in a line items or product details section of a transactional module such as Quotes, Sales Orders or Invoices using code: Zoho Deluge.

Why?
At time of print, Zoho had recently introduced the ability to have custom fields in your line items, alongside the product name, list price, quantity, tax, etc. In the example below, we have added a column called "Group Name" in the CRM Quote module as per the following screenshot:

Populating Custom Field in a Quote Line Item

How?
Again at the time of this article, this is only modifiable when using REST API v2.1. We are going to update the field with label "Group Name" but API name "Grouping" in a list item column.

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 30 April 2021; Hits: 4019

What?
This is an article to demonstrate how to log a time event under a Zoho Projects Issue using code (Zoho Deluge) rather than the graphical user interface (GUI). Note this would probably be similar to when trying to enter a time against a project Task but this article is focused on getting this working against Project Issues. Also note, we will refer to Project Issues in this article, but in the backend code, Zoho refer to Issues as "Bugs".

Why?
At time of this article (Apr-2021), we could not find a working example that could allow us to do this. I have provided some links at the end of this article for you which we tried to use but only helped us out about half-way, the rest we guessed on our own:
Zoho Projects - Add Time Log to an Issue Using Deluge - Projects Issue Time Log

Zoho Projects - Add Time Log to an Issue Using Deluge - Projects Issue Time Log

Our use case, is that we are developing a Zoho Creator app that will help staff log time and then push the creator record to Zoho Projects.

How?
For the following example, you will need to have setup a Zoho Oauth Connection with the appropriate authorized scopes and have access to all related systems such as Zoho Projects and the originating app (in this example, Zoho Creator).

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 28 April 2021; Hits: 8568

What?
This is a very quick article with examples of managing a multi-user or multi-lookup field in CRM using Zoho Deluge.

Why?
Sometimes you might need this when data mapping fields from one module to another, sometimes you need to manage existing multi-lookups/users in a record.

How?
So the key point to remember is that all multi-select lookup and multi-user lookup fields are held in temporary CRM modules called a "LinkingModule" (as opposed to standard modules and custom modules).

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 03 February 2021; Hits: 9523

What?
This is an article documenting how to send a Zoho Deluge Map request to an API which is expecting nested/2d/multi-dimensonal arrays. In the example below, we are posting to a PHP script for testing but I have since sent something similar to an API expecting nested arrays (not sure if they were PHP) and it works.

Why?
This took me several days and in the end only going through various forums and documentation, I found a solution which worked for me. Note that usually I could customize the receiving PHP script to receive a JSON request and process it that way but my usage was to send data to a Third-Party API over which I had no control.

What I need to send to the 3rd-party API:

copy raw

{
  "auth": {
    "secret": "can_you_keep_a_secret",
    "key": "aaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff11112222"
  },
  "data": {
    "member_id": "123456",
    "channel_name": "shopify",
    "item_name": "Joel's Awesome Life",
    "item_price": "priceless"
  }
}

{
"auth": {
"secret": "can_you_keep_a_secret",
"key": "aaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff11112222"
},
"data": {
"member_id": "123456",
"channel_name": "shopify",
"item_name": "Joel's Awesome Life",
"item_price": "priceless"
}
}

What Zoho sends to the 3rd-party API:
Sending a map request using the invokeUrl() function, the odd thing is that Zoho's request adds double-quotes to the request and escapes the other double-quotes sending something like this:

copy raw

{
  "auth": "{\"secret\": \"can_you_keep_a_secret\",\"key\":\"aaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff11112222\"}",
  "data": "{\"member_id\": \"123456\",\"channel_name\": \"shopify\",\"item_name\": \"Joel's Awesome Life\",\"item_price\": \"priceless\"}"
}

{
"auth": "{\"secret\": \"can_you_keep_a_secret\",\"key\":\"aaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff11112222\"}",
"data": "{\"member_id\": \"123456\",\"channel_name\": \"shopify\",\"item_name\": \"Joel's Awesome Life\",\"item_price\": \"priceless\"}"
}

What I have in Deluge

copy raw

m_Auth = Map();
m_AuthSub = Map();
m_AuthSub.put("secret","can_you_keep_a_secret");
m_AuthSub.put("key","aaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff11112222");
m_Auth.put("auth",m_AuthSub);
m_Data = Map();
m_DataRecord = Map();
m_DataRecord.put("member_id","123456");
m_DataRecord.put("channel_name","shopify");
m_DataRecord.put("item_name","Joel's Awesome Life");
m_DataRecord.put("item_price","priceless");
m_Data.put("data", m_DataRecord);

m_Auth = Map();
m_AuthSub = Map();
m_AuthSub.put("secret","can_you_keep_a_secret");
m_AuthSub.put("key","aaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff11112222");
m_Auth.put("auth",m_AuthSub);
m_Data = Map();
m_DataRecord = Map();
m_DataRecord.put("member_id","123456");
m_DataRecord.put("channel_name","shopify");
m_DataRecord.put("item_name","Joel's Awesome Life");
m_DataRecord.put("item_price","priceless");
m_Data.put("data", m_DataRecord);

How?
So this is more of an annoyance then an impossible task... because it is possible, the technique above is simply wrong. The trick and solution is a lot simpler than you might think...

Category: Zoho :: Article: 740

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 02 February 2021; Hits: 6783

What?
This is an article to demo some Deluge code on how to download a file that was uploaded in CRM in a custom module in field that was of type "File Upload".

Why?
Just to remind me where I went wrong, I have a client with ZohoCRM who upload a PDF (can be any file but is usually a PDF) to a custom module in their CRM; I then need the customer from the customer portal in a ZohoCreator app to be able to download this file.

How?
The trick to doing this is that actually

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 29 January 2021; Hits: 10736

What?
This is a quick article to template some code to me on sorting a map variable in Zoho Deluge, specifically Zoho Creator.

Why?
I do this a lot but in the following example, I want to sort a list of records by their date in descending order. Yes this functionality exists in reports but I want to do it in code so as to display it in a HTML table.

What I have:

copy raw

id      name        date
---------------------------------------------
46498   Joel        1977-11-14T12:30:00+00:00
8949    Anonymouse  1923-10-16T15:00:00+00:00
335448  Amazing     1997-07-05T23:15:00+00:00

id name date
---------------------------------------------
46498 Joel 1977-11-14T12:30:00+00:00
8949 Anonymouse 1923-10-16T15:00:00+00:00
335448 Amazing 1997-07-05T23:15:00+00:00

What I want:

copy raw

id      name        date
---------------------------------------------
335448  Amazing     1997-07-05T23:15:00+00:00
46498   Joel        1977-11-14T12:30:00+00:00
8949    Anonymouse  1923-10-16T15:00:00+00:00

id name date
---------------------------------------------
335448 Amazing 1997-07-05T23:15:00+00:00
46498 Joel 1977-11-14T12:30:00+00:00
8949 Anonymouse 1923-10-16T15:00:00+00:00

How?
So to give you a gist of what the following snippet of code is doing, let me give an overview:

Build up a map with sample data (you won't need to this, use your own data, this one is for this demonstration only)
Initialize a list to hold the keys which we will use to sort in ascending/descending order and a map created to hold all the records.
Loop through the sample map to create the new map we can sort as well as to add keys to the list declared previously.
Sort the list of keys in ascending/descending order.
Loop through the list of keys, retrieving each record

Category: Zoho :: Article: 738

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 11 January 2021; Hits: 5568

What?
A very quick article on converting a Map string into a HTML table without using a for each loop.

Why?
I have quite a big response from our CRM that hits a statement execution limit if I use a for loop. I have a map with 3 columns: first_name, last_name, and ID. What I want is a HTML table now with the headers and data but without using a for loop.

What I have:

copy raw

{"First_Name":"Joel","Last_Name":"Lipman","id":"1"},{"First_Name":"Another","Last_Name":"Person","id":"2"}

{"First_Name":"Joel","Last_Name":"Lipman","id":"1"},{"First_Name":"Another","Last_Name":"Person","id":"2"}

What I want:

First Name	Last Name	ID
Joel	Lipman	1
Another	Person	2

How?
This is a bit of a dirty solution and as long as "id" is not your first column (because "id" can be found in names like "David") it will work.

Category: Zoho :: Article: 737

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 10 December 2020; Hits: 6359

What?
This article documents how to stop an employee from applying for leave when already 80% of their team have already booked the same date off. My brief was:

Check the department this employee belongs to
Search for employees of the same department (team members) who have booked the same days off (ie count holiday clashes)
Prevent an employee for applying for leave if over 80% of the department have already booked the requested dates off.

In other words, if there are 10 people in a department/team, and 8 people have booked tomorrow off, prevent a 9th team member booking tomorrow off.

Why?
I've written this article as it took a while to achieve. The Zoho People application and its API are documented but there are problems with the documentation at the time that this article was written. One is that there are 2 sets of documentation and the other is that the majority of the documentation doesn't refer to OAuth 2.0/json and instead uses the deprecated authtoken v1 and XML.

How?
The trick in this solution was more about the process and what that process was.

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 06 December 2020; Hits: 8364

What?
The aim of this article is to document how you can display a Creator report to the user, that they can select (tickbox) multiple records in that report, and then have a button that loops through all the selected (ticked) records. The example below documents a report of Quotes where we want to merge all the product line items of each quote into one single quote.
Zoho Creator - Report Multiple Records Selected

Zoho Creator - Report Multiple Records Selected

Why?
I've written this article because I keep forgetting on how to do this. I have a specific order of steps on how I do this, you may find other ways but this is one that works for me.

How?
So here's an overview and then we'll go into more detail:

Create a function that accepts a form of records
Create a workflow that understands the function parameters

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 17 November 2020; Hits: 7295

What?
This is a quick article I use to list step by step on how to set up a custom domain for a Zoho Creator customer portal. In this example, we are going to use a subdomain of a company which has the domain joellipman.com.

Why?
This took me a bit of going backwards and forwards to Zoho rather than getting my client to do this. The aim is to take up as little time as possible of the third-parties involved, plus the documentation online was in parts and requires going to several pages across the Internet. Here I have 1 page and 1 article documenting the process.

How?
I'm breaking this down into 3 stages:

Zoho Creator: Specify Custom Domain
Domain Registrar: Setup subdomain and add CNAME
Zoho Support: Get Zoho to setup SSL

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 06 November 2020; Hits: 11168

What?
So I thought I'd write a quick article to remind me and to develop a simple notification system that will popup for any user on the submit of a form, or on the click of a button or on the click of a link on a page.

Why?
Because alert (alert task) can only be used on a load of a form, on a change of a field or on the validate process. And because info can only be displayed to an admin and even in some cases only as an additional link in the form. The example below is for use in a customer portal on the click of a report button (report workflow).

How?
This will create a popup using the built-in popup of Zoho creator and gives you the freedom to style the notification as any modal would.

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