CRM - Joel Lipman .Com

ZohoBooks: Code 15 Ensure Billing Address has less than 100 characters

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 18 September 2023; Hits: 94

What?
Another article on something I learned today despite never running into this issue before; but sending a billing/shipping address included in a request to create or update an estimate in ZohoBooks will fail...

Why?
I have a function to push a ZohoCRM quote to a ZohoBooks estimate and a client asked that the address on the CRM record 'pulls through'. Sending the address in the same request however gives me the following error:

{ "code": 15, "message": "Please ensure that the billing_address has less than 100 characters." }

How?
So the quick answer is 2 separate API calls after you have sent the code to either create or update the estimate in ZohoBooks. You will need the returned estimate ID and I'm not 100% sure the attention/phone number goes along as my client didn't include these in her estimate template... But I'm sending them anyway.

Zoho Creator: Sendmail a list of attachments

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 20 July 2023; Hits: 1387

What?
This is a very quick article on sending an email with Deluge which needs a dynamic number of files attached to it.

Why?
This came up during a call with another developer and it occurred to me that perhaps this isn't clearly documented. But there are tips found across the web just not specifically addressing this.

How?
Here is the code for a test function which downloads 2 files from a public domain, no user wall. The key here which the official documentation is missing is the .setParamName() but for those who have spent time to find this function, they'll already know this.

Zoho Deluge: Proper Case for Names

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 13 July 2023; Hits: 494

What?
This is an open article without any completion in mind; to set the proper case of a name, as in capitalize the first letter, lower case the rest but then with exceptions.

Why?
Some of the Zoho Apps are incredibly case-sensitive and consider some records containing people's names as duplicates, when actually they are the same entity but may have uppercased a letter in their name while the other entry does not...

This article is a start and adaptation of my previous article Convert to Proper Case in T-SQL which I had previously used for the migration of a HR system. This is intended to work using Zoho Deluge.

How?
There are a number of combinations that I won't have thought of but the below code sufficed for my current task, common English and some European names:

Zoho Creator: Find Duplicates by Customer Name for Large Datasets

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 12 July 2023; Hits: 488

What?
There are other sources on the web which show you how to deduplicate a contact but usually involve entering a customer name or other key to check if there are already records in the system with that key. I can't sit there entering one customer at a time. Even a loop would hit a statement execution limit.

Why?
My use-case is that I need this done over a dataset of 20k+ contact records and that's only half of the production system's contacts. I needed a quick bit of code to find any duplicates, all within the Zoho Creator app using Zoho Deluge and avoiding the use of any third-party APIs.

How?
My team of developers actually helped me solve this one as I was slowly dispairing...

Zoho Deluge: Get the Week Number if Week starts on a Monday

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 06 July 2023; Hits: 469

What?
A quick article on determining the week number of the year if your week starts on a Monday and not a Sunday.

Why?
I think it's the US system which generally says that a week starts on a Sunday but in the United Kingdom, the week generally starts on a Monday. So let's say there's a schedule that has to be run weekly and include all the orders of a specific week...

Just to confuse everyone in the world, the day index for a Sunday is 7 (ie. myDate.toString("u") returns 7) and the week commences on a Sunday (ie. myDate.toStartOfWeek("EEEE") returns Sunday). In other words, the day counting starts at 7, followed by 1 for Monday, 2 for Tuesday, and so on...

How?
The logic behind this would be to take the date of the order, check if the order date is a Sunday, subtract a day, and return the week number:

Zoho Books: Get Invoice Payment Terms via API

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 06 July 2023; Hits: 309

What?
A quick article on getting the payment terms in Zoho Books along with their IDs.

Why?
I often need to send through an automatic payment term on the creation of an invoice but lots of my clients set their due dates differently.

How?
The following snippet of code will query the metadata api in Zoho Books and return a JSON of what the payment terms are.

Zoho Deluge: Determine if Daylight Savings are in effect

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 03 July 2023; Hits: 350

What?
If you're lucky enough to build an application for a client based in a country that changes its clocks twice a year, then I'm opening this article without a 100% certain solution as I need to wait about 4 months until I can confirm this works.

Why?
I've covered this before in a fair few articles on this website but for clients in the US, where there could be 4 different timezones between customer, agent, HQ, server; we would create a separate table to manage this data. I can't do this for every client, so here's a quick snippet to just check if Daylight Savings are in effect for the United Kingdom.

How?
Based on the fact that the United Kingdom is on the Prime Meridian and when no daylight savings are in effect, the hour difference to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) should be zero, then for checking if daylight savings is in effect in the UK, we should be able to take Greenwich Mean Time and compare to UTC.

Zoho CRM: Change System Field Length

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 19 June 2023; Hits: 499

What?
This is an article documenting how to remove the block on changes to a system field in ZohoCRM.

Why?
Our use-case today is that a customer wanted to map the Postal Code or Zip from a Lead record to an opportunity (or Deal) record. If you are using custom fields, then just ensure that the data type and field lengths match. In this case, they are system fields for the Postal Code which out-of-the-box differ in length so they do not list the postal code on the deal record to be listed in the "Lead Conversion Mapping" page.

In the Leads module, the Zip field is 30 characters; in the deal module, the Zip field is 20 characters... but we need these to match if we want to map them in the "Lead Conversion Mapping" page.

How?
This is a bit of a hack and most likely not recommended... but it is a workaround I have used and that worked when converting a lead to a deal. Note that this hack doesn't work on the system field label name (I tried) just on the length field. Use the translations file to change system field labels

Zoho Finance Suite Schedule: PATTERN NOT MATCHED

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 12 June 2023; Hits: 443

What?
A super quick article on resolving this issue if it ever appears again.

Why?
At time of print, this error was happening to schedules in Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, and Zoho Subscriptions. Unless you can monitor when these type of schedules are failing, you won't see this error until you go in and try to save it again.

How?
The super quick answer is remove any spaces from the name of the schedule.

Zoho Inventory: Enable Tracking using the API

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 04 May 2023; Hits: 1143

What?
One of these articles because I spent so long trying different snippets of code to enable tracking when using Deluge code to create an item in Zoho Inventory:

Zoho Inventory: Enable Tracking using the API

Why?
Who uses ZohoInventory for anything else than tracking stock...?

How?
So the quick answer is one missing parameter to send through which is "item_type=inventory"... A little longer, is do ensure you have Zoho Inventory enabled.

Zoho: Email Deliverability / SPF / DKIM / DMARC / Toolkit

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 04 May 2023; Hits: 709

What?
A quick article on the SPF & DKIM setup to improve email deliverability from a ZohoApp and methods to check.

Why?
Not sure how I came across it as most of our customers don't use ZohoMail, but there is a Zoho Toolkit to run some checks on the email deliverability for a customer: https://zohomail.tools/#runChecks.

How?
So first I'll outline the steps to set this up in ZohoCRM and then how to troubleshoot issues with this. One important thing to note is that the setup needs to be done by whoever manages the domain for the client.

ZohoCRM Webhook: Create ZohoInventory Records from an eBay order

: Joel Lipman; Zoho; 27 April 2023; Hits: 741

What?
This is a not-so-quick article that queries an eBay order and creates the relevant ZohoInventory item, contact, sales order, package slip, shipment order, invoice, payment records...

Why?
I'm storing this here as a reference and taking the bits that I need for the various clients that request an eBay integration. This is a comprehensive snippet which does the whole lot.

How?
Using the method of "mega-functions", here is the code snippet for one function which will accept as parameter the eBay order reference and generate all the respective records in Zoho Inventory. We're using a ZohoCRM webhook, because CRM webhooks run more reliably then the ones we have found in ZohoBooks and other Zoho Apps.