What?
An article to document setting up a SalesIQ bot that includes an integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Please understand if this is behind a userwall as we tend to charge between 2k to 5k to implement this solution in client's systems.

Why?
Because AI... This is a follow-on from my previous article: Zoho Cliq: Integrate OpenAI and ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo.

How?
It's maybe worthwhile noting here the different handlers of the bot here:

• Trigger Handler: execute when the condition set in the visitor criteria section is fulfullied by the visitor on the website.
• Message Handler: invoked when the the bot receives a message from the website visitor
• Context Handler: invoked when all the answers for a context action are collected.
• Failure Handler: for when there is an error
Register to read more ...

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What?
An article on adding an accept and decline button on the estimate (aka Quote) notification template within ZohoBooks.

Why?
The use-case is simply that my client wants to make it easier for their customers to accept or decline a quote. Sure there's a portal and you can probably do it from there but this is a one-click accept or decline then done.

One of the biggest hurdles here, which may sound trivial, was the response when an end customer clicks on either the accept or decline button. Using ZohoFlow or other Zoho app for a webhook response, would result in the end customer suddenly downloading a JSON file. Looked a bit suspicious. The code below opens a new tab in their web-browser displaying a plain output message.

How?
So there are 2 caveats to this solution: 1 is that you will need ZohoCRM. I've tried using the "Incoming Webhooks" feature of ZohoBooks but realised the word "Incoming" is the operative word as the response cannot be configured in ZohoBooks like we need to in this solution; namely the webhook response needs to have a header and a body.

The 2nd caveat is a concern around security. It is difficult to guess a customer's Zoho ID; some might say almost impossible. To use other fields that could be sent via the URL as a verification to be checked at the webhook endpoint would be good as well; but I couldn't spend time finding fields that can be 'placeheld', other than what the interface offers, into the template.

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What?
An article on creating a color picker from a specific palette using an input field of a radio type.

Why?
At the time of print, this feature is not provided out-of-the-box and getting our users to learn about hexadecimal color references and Red Green Blue (RGB) values is somewhat difficult. What would be nice-to-have is if they could be presented with a bunch of colors and they click on one to select it.


When are colors used? Well in this use-case, we are using it to color events in a calendar associated with specific staff. Probably not the most essential part of a system but important to some staff...

How?
In an earlier article, I've shown how to change a radio type field in ZohoCreator into a Carousel type of interface. This time, we're going to repurpose and restyle a radio type field into a color picker.

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What?
A quick article to document a Zoho Deluge function converting a hexadecimal color reference to a Red Green Blue value (RGB).

Why?
It's likely that Zoho will avail their color picker at some point as an input but at the time of print, this hasn't happened yet. Here's a function in deluge that takes a 3 or 6 character hexadecimal color and returns the RGB values for you.

How?
Very quickly, we take each character from the given string and convert it to its RGB value. Replace letters A to F with their numeric equivalents. Made up of 2 characters to convert to an RGB subset, the 1st value is to be multiplied by 16 and then added to the value of the 2nd; this equals the RGB value.

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What?
A really quick article on a pretty cool requirement, making 2 fields mandatory but if one is completed then making the other optional.

Why?
My use-case is that the mobile or email field on a Zoho CRM contact record is used to authenticate the contact on a Wordpress portal. OTP or 2FA or MFA or OTC is in effect however; so a contact email OR phone number is required. Both aren't required but at least one should be.

How?
We can do this without code and only using ZohoCRM layout rules. Let's take a contact record for demo purposes:
If I enter a phone number:
If I enter an email:

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What?
This is an article to document how to get your team folder ID, retrieve information about it, and upload to it via the API.

Why?
The documentation is there but making sense of it, is somewhat difficult, at least for me.

How?
So when I was trying this, I would get either "URL rule not configured" or an unhelpful blank response.

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What?
I think I have a similar article on this website but the article below documents the full process to create a button that will map the values/fields from the record into a CRM Mail Merge template and send it off for signing, then return the Signed document attached to the initial record (where the button was).

Why?
If anyone has the envious task of sending a document out for signing by a customer, you will know this takes a while to do:

1. You have to find the contact record in CRM for example
2. Click on "Send for Zoho Sign"
3. Select the template document or upload one
4. Add the fields that you will complete, and the ones that other recipients will complete
5. Send it for your end-user to complete and sign it
6. This comes back to a section called "ZohoSign Documents", download the attachment
7. Go back to the contact record, and upload the file to the attachment...

Some customers say this is unworkable and takes far too long, especially the part of adding the various field placeholders onto the template document; every time.

What if I told you we can code a single button on the record which does all of that for you; with only you needing to approve the document before it gets sent to the end user, and when they finish signing it, it attaches automatically back on to the record?... It is possible. The article below documents it but as this is a fair bit of coding, you may want to ask us to build this solution for you. It can take a few days but it will save your staff a ton of time per week!

What your staff see:
How?
So we're going to create a button. Let's use the example of a credit application you want to send to your customer, and when they complete it, the PDF version gets attached to their contact record... all from one click of a button:

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What?
A very quick article on how to check what the statement execution limit is on the Zoho application you are working in.

Why?
Our use-case is that an application we built in Zoho Creator was hitting statement execution limits and rather than proposing an upgrade or add-on to the subscription plan; we wanted some proof using code.

How?
We're going to use a quick snippet of some code. So create a function in the Zoho App you are checking, or somewhere you can write some Zoho Deluge code.

Note that requesting an increase of the limit or an upgrade to the subscription will likely to have to be asked directly to Zoho rather than using the online subscription plan management section.

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What?
This is an article to remind me how I did this for a customer and images help visualize the health of the system.

Why?
The use-case here is to build a system which monitors a Zoho App for when records were last modified and if a synchronization process starts to fail, there should be images or icons warning or advising of failures.

How?
The key trick to use here the ability for Zoho Analytics to display different images based on a criteria or a value within a data table. As documented in an earlier article, put the URL of the image, then change it's format to show the image and not the URL text. In this example, we are using images uploaded in the Zoho Analytics image library but you would need images either uploaded in Analytics or a publicly accessible image without a user wall.

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What?
A quick article because I couldn't find anything that documented this with a working example.

Why?
The use-case here is that we want to make a ZohoCreator page display events for this month from ZohoProjects.

How?
The bit that stumped me was making a call to the Events endpoint as it would just come back with a blank response...

The reason it was blank was due to my parameters; the key item to remember is that status is a mandatory field and it can either be "closed" or "open".

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What?
A quick article to document 2 features in deluge code: a custom related list in ZohoBooks, and a reminder on how to read a table from ZohoAnalytics.

Why?
My use-case here is that we have a client who uses their purchase orders and sales orders as part of a logistics solution where items are purchased from a supplier, sent to another supplier for grading, and then sent on to the end user/customer.

A custom field against the item record has been added which is a lookup to the Sales Order module. This means that on a purchase order, and per line item, the staff can specify which Sales Order the item relates to.

How?
At time of print, adding the lookup to the line item will automatically display a related list on the Sales Order but does not associate any records... not sure why this is. So we have a workaround, by sending all the data including the custom fields per line items to ZohoAnalytics; and in ZohoAnalytics importing a table based on a query which joins the sales orders and purchase order items by the custom lookup field.

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What?
A quick article on how to setup an automation that checks if a datasource synchronization between Zoho People and Zoho Analytics failed. This can be adapted to any data source for Zoho Analytics.

Why?
We're assisting a client implement Zoho People as their new HR solution. Zoho Analytics is used to generate specific spreadsheets for a feed into their third-party payroll system. If the data is incorrect in Zoho Analytics, and payroll gets run with these discrepancies, then they will have a fair few disgruntled employees who may have been paid incorrectly. As such this system has to be reliable and the system managers need to be notified in advance of any errors with the intention to be able to correct any inconsistencies themselves.

How?
We're going to add a scheduled workflow on a daily basis at 1am in the morning every day. This will be added to the client's Zoho People instance which will check the datasource metadata via the Analytics API.

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