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.

What?
A quick article on how to use remove() on a map variable as well as a snippet of code to copy tags from a contact to a deal record.

Why?
Anything that stumps me for 30 minutes is worth writing a quick article on. In this case, I had a function querying tags on a contact record which needed to be copied to a deal record. I wanted to copy over the tag but apparently, the ID of the tag is not allowed to be copied over.

The official documentation says to use remove() to remove a key from a map. In this case, the ID key and value pair. It would then tell me the list was null when I thought I was adding the map with the ID removed back into a list. The map itself was null.

How?
We are using an API action called "Add_Tags". I'm going to get the tags of the contact record using an invokeurl because shortcode only gives me name and ID; but I want the color code field as well which I only seem to get with an InvokeURL. I'm then going to create a list map of tags and add these to the deal record.

What?
A really quick article to test when to use isNull and isBlank.

Why?
So I've noticed that looking at people's Zoho Deluge code, there will often be a check on a null before or after the variable:

if(v_Test.isBlank())
{
    ...
}

VS

if(isBlank(v_Test))
{
    ...
}

isBlank() can be used to check if the string only contains blanks or if a value is null...

How?
Consider the following test function:

What?
An article for me or for whoever dares to upgrade their Joomla CMS from version 3 to version 5.

Disclaimer: I'm used to doing this without any third-party extensions. I strongly recommend you do a backup beforehand of the database and of all your files

Why?
I keep getting complaints that my server wants to upgrade my PHP v7.x to PHP v8.x. I also get complaints (from my server not from humans) that my Joomla version needs updating...

I'm writing this in case I ever have to upgrade other people's Joomla CMS and if it helps anyone else out there.

How?
There aren't too many steps but this is what I went through and I might amend this if I see any new issues:

What?
A really quick article on demonstrating a nested try...catch()... statement working in Zoho CRM.

Why?
To prove a point to ChatGPT who said this was not possible... and to deal with a scenario which exists for a client of mine.

The use-case for my Cx is that they need documents converted from HTML to PDF — as in we send it a bit of code in HTML and we want a PDF file returned. I have severaly instances of an API which accepts HTML and returns a PDF file. Nothing complex but issues with one of the servers being down, or inaccessible due to certificate expirys, means that the Cx business halts. In order to add a bit of clustering, we have added a bit of code for it to try one server first, if there is any kind of an error with that server, it tries a second server... We now want to add a third server to try if the first 2 fail for whatever reason.

How?
Admittedly, perhaps this maybe wasn't possible but as of February 2024; I have been able to test and implement this.

What?
A ridiculously quick article on resolving a zoho.crm.getRelatedRecords() combined with a zoho.crm.bulkUpdate issue.

Why?
Trying to be clever and reducing the API calls to go through a few thousand records and to update the related records. I was getting the error INVALID_DATA with the details being api_name:'data'... But this is shortcode, not an invokeURL.

{ "code":"INVALID_DATA", "details":{ "api_name":"data" }, "message":"invalid data", "status":"error" }

How?
I recall covering this solution before but it boils simply down to the zoho.crm.getRelatedRecords() not retrieving related records which are clearly visible when using the CRM.

What?
A quick article on making an "upload file" field mandatory.

Why?
Because for some reason, it wouldn't appear as selectable when I tried using a layout rule. Probably everyone else has figured this out and I'm just late to the party.

How?
Through the wonders of Zoho CRM Client Script.

So we're going to check on page onload, onchange for the Create Page (Standard), Edit Page (Standard), and Details Page (Standard).

What?
This is a quick bit of code for my reference so that I don't have to keep finding a function that gives me the syntax of how to either create or update a record using invokeUrl.

Why?
Because my designers keep including custom fields in their transactional modules line items (quotes, sales orders, invoices, purchase orders). The only way to update these are by using the API and deluge function invokeURL rather than the usual shortcode of zoho.crm.updateRecord() or zoho.crm.createRecord().

How?
This is somewhere in the official documentation but here's the bits that I need: