What?
A quick article showing 2 ways of connecting to Shopify's REST API with a custom app.

Note that this is not for an app embedded in the Shopify instance but for a third-party app, such as a Zoho Creator app, to connect to the data within Shopify.

Why?
At time of print, we have woken up to the news that including a username and password, or a client and secret in the endpoint of a URL will no longer be supported in the Zoho Deluge invokeURL task...

This article exists because I spent 2 hours going down the rabbit hole of trying to use OAuth2 and following the usual steps: Grant Code, Refresh Token, Access Token. I also went down the rabbit hole of installing app-bridge and configuring a JWT which was an absolute waste of time with regards to what I was attempting to do.

How?
Let me show you how we used to connect and then what the new code will be. The preamble to both of these is how to get the values to include in the invokeURL headers and payload.

What?
Just noted this down in case I need to do it again. This article documents how to take a 5.5 hour video (MP4) and have it transcribed by a locally installed AI on a MacOS (running Sequoia 15.1.1).

Why?
Needed for training videos as a follow-on from my article on how to download videos from a session on TrainerCentralSite.com.

How?
OpenAI's ChatGPT doesn't like more than a 500Mb file attachment; and no more than 10 files at a time. I have a 1.5 Gb video which has a duration of 5.5 hours. I struggled with this and ultimately used VOSK but I'm leaving the instructions here in case it works for you.

What?
Looking for an online tool that will take an image and make a thumbnail copy? This article is for me if I ever want to recreate an online tool capable of receiving an image URL and which both generates and outputs a thumbnail image and makes it downloadable via URL.

Why?
Performance. I have a client with about 10k images of products that they want to appear in a dropdown menu of a JavaScript widget. When the user first loads up the webpage containing the widget, 10k images are downloaded. I have put in a lazy loading process where it will load the first few images and as the user scrolls down the dropdown, more are loaded. This still gets buggy on certain mobile devices as some images are over 1Mb.

So I needed a tool that every time a new product is added, a thumbnail gets generated and stored in the same application. Trawling through the first few pages of Google, all the online tools that did the same had a pricing page. I can understand why you would need to limit users so I don't blame them. But if you can, why not make your own?

How?
So you will need a webserver of your own running PHP 8. The following PHP script was only tested using PHP version 8.x so I can't say whether it will work for previous versions.

I cannot take credit for this script, as I asked OpenAI's ChatGPT to write it initially, and to build upon it as I kept moving the goal posts, figuratively speaking, and changing the requirements. I am impressed however that every version it iterated, worked exactly as I asked with only 1 error where it mixed a method with a comment but thereafter, a working script every time.

What?
A quick article with snippets of code to hide and show certain tabs on a deal record based on the pipeline.

Why?
A request from a customer asked if a tab specific to the pipeline selected can be shown while others hidden. Standard tabs such as Notes, Attachments, Emails, and Timeline should remain.

Code will be needed as a layout rule couldn't control the tabs on a canvas view page. An additional function is needed as the pipeline was not displayed on the canvas view of the deal record but it was on the edit page.

How?
First we're going to add some element IDs to the canvas view page on each of the tabs. Then we'll make an OAuth function that can be executed by the client script which returns the value of the Pipeline given a deal record ID. Finally, we'll have client script execute this function, then show/hide tabs based on the value.

What?
An article on a client script used in CRM which is a working example of rewriting a subform (line items of an invoice) and calls a REST API fuction to return the custom fields of the line items. Pretty much a function which took me a day to write.

Why?
As mentioned, it took me a while to write and I would like to use it as a reference for when I forget how to do this.

The use-case here is that we have a dropdown/picklist on a CRM invoice record that has the options of "Deposit" and "Final Balance". This rewrites the invoice line items to represent a deposit or a final balance invoice with the deposit deducted. Because these line items have custom fields, we need to copy over all the custom values to the new line items.

How?
This is about an hour's work doing it on a CRM workflow (save of record) but here we're going to do it in client script:

What?
A frustrated article about an issue that took me a fair few hours to resolve. So I'm putting it here as I thought I covered this previously but couldn't find it on my website. This was previously titled something along the lines of truncating to 2 decimals but finance is so much more complicated.

Why?
Playing around with VAT / Tax, inclusive /exclusive, but in this case it is the rate that gets rounded. The numbers at the end still need to match what's in CRM and with ZohoBooks rounding differently can make cent/penny errors into 100s of dollar/pound errors.

Zoho CRM has a fun way of rounding which differs to Zoho Books so when pushing an invoice, there's a strong chance of being a cent/penny off. Let's take the following example of an item with a list price of 12345.545:

ZohoCRM Line Item

ZohoBooks Line Item

How?

What?
eBay allows users to request the deletion of their personal data from eBay's own systems, as well as from the systems of all partners who store or display that data, including third-party developers integrated with eBay APIs through the eBay Developers Program.

To help third-party developers comply with these requests, eBay has implemented a push notification system. This system alerts all eBay Developers Program applications when a user has requested the deletion of their personal data and closure of their eBay account. This article explains the process third-party developers must follow to subscribe to, receive, respond to, and validate these notifications.

Why?
As quoted from the page: https://developer.ebay.com/marketplace-account-deletion

"Existing Developers: The August 31, 2021 deadline for existing developers to subscribe to or opt out of eBay marketplace account deletion/closure notifications has passed. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in termination of your access to the Developer Tools, and/or reduced access to all or some APIs.

New Developers: All new third-party developers coming to the platform must subscribe to or opt out of eBay marketplace account deletion/closure notifications before they make their first API call. Once the new developer's application is subscribed to eBay marketplace account deletion/closure notifications or they have successfully opted out of the notifications, the keyset/App ID is activated, and they can begin making API calls."

How?
Let's cover the first preamble points here:

1. While completing the form, the developer subscribes to eBay marketplace account deletion/closure notifications by saving an endpoint URL and verification token, eBay sends a unique challenge code via a GET request (e.g., GET https://?challenge_code=123). The provided endpoint URL must use the 'https' protocol and cannot include internal IP addresses or 'localhost'.
2. Upon receiving the unique challenge code, the endpoint must hash the challengeCode, verificationToken, and endpoint URL (in that exact order), and respond to eBay with an HTTP 200 OK status, including the hashed result in JSON format within the challengeResponse field. The response's Content-Type header must be set to application/json.

What?
An article on removing duplicate products within ZohoCRM.

Why?
Product duplicates are a common issue during development, especially when we have products imported via a feed or API or simply by staff and their spreadsheets. There is a deduplication feature for leads and contacts but not for products.

How?
There may be a better way of doing this. What I'm trying to have is a generic function that will work on any CRM and possibly be quick to adapt to a module other than products.

This function will also try to delete the duplicate but if the duplicate is the one used in a transactional module record (eg. quotes, sales orders, invoices, purchase orders), then it will delete the older one (referred to as keep ID).

Another point is that this is using COQL to sort the records and tries to keep the first version of the record (sorted by ID ascending) and will attempt to delete the other records which match on product name.

I would recommend commenting out the delete commands and leaving the info commands to preview what records it will delete. I also recommend doing a data backup beforehand.