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?
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:

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?
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?
This is an article to remind me how to search for CRM records by a value that may contain an ampersand or parenthesis.

Why?
I wrote this article because some searches will work for me and sometimes it won't. Escaping the ampersand with a backslash or url encoding to %26 wasn't working for me. I spent several hours trying to write a script that could search for the existing records by company name. The issue is that if you use zoho.crm.searchRecords() this will work fine for company names without special characters such as the ampersand or parentheses. But what if amongst your records you may want to find:

Company Name: Father & Sons (Incorporated)
Contact Name: O'Reilly

How?
Well I've tried various replace methods with regular expressions but the only method reliable enough I have found to work each time is using the CRM Object Query Language or Zoho's COQL. Similar to SQL but subject to similar issues of escaping special characters...

What?
This is a quick article to re-enable desktop notifications after having been prompted initially and having clicked on "Not Now".

Why?
I'm not sure when this prompt is supposed to prompt you again. A client of ours had accidentally clicked on "Not Now" instead of clicking on the "Enable". Documented below is how to get this to prompt you again.

How?
This largely depends on whether you are using the Google Chrome web browser. In this case version 100 and is correct at time of print.

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.

What?
A collection of code snippets I seem to be regularly using to generate a dynamic map of system values held in a ZohoBooks instance.

Why?
Rather than hard-coding and having a ton of if..then statements, I can feed these maps a textual value and it returns the ID to use. Some of these can be found elsewhere in my site but I'm putting all of them here just for quick reference.

How?
Note that for the below, I recently updated this article (2024-05-21) due to the API domain name change from https://books.zoho.com to https://www.zohoapis.com/books and changed the Top Level Domain (or Zoho DataCenter) from EU to COM as I was using this for a client on the US datacenter.