What?
A quick article on how to upload an image to the product/item listing in Zoho Inventory.

Why?
We're enhancing the out-of-the-box integration from eBay to Zoho Inventory bespoke for a customer. We want the photo on eBay to be downloaded and uploaded to the Zoho Inventory record for the respective record. As Zoho Books and Zoho Subscriptions uses the same database tables as Zoho Inventory, and there's more documentation on the API for Zoho Books, we're going to apply this solution to Zoho Books.

How?
We're not going to go into detail on how to parse an eBay response here (see my other articles on eBay webhooks). Instead, all we want is the URL of an image to be downloaded, then uploaded to the Zoho Inventory or Zoho Books item record.

What?
Following on from the article: Zoho Cliq: Integrate OpenAI and ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. This is the next step as we get it to look at data within ZohoCRM.

Why?
Because it is a serious improvement upon ZohoZIA and we get a lot of requests around customizing ZohoZIA...

How?
So taking ideas from my previous article for ZohoCliq; let's use what we know to develop a ZohoZIA for a demo system.

There are several steps, so first we will set up the ZIA action "Ask ChatGPT" using the GUI, then we will capture the question using Deluge code and query the OpenAI ChatGPT API to return a response.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

What?
An example of code using the new API call "Module Record Count" with some criteria.

Why?
At time of print, I couldn't find an example of how to use this API call with search filters or criteria. Not sure about the rest of you, but I've been using this for pagination purposes and for the system to work out how many pages or loops in total it would need to do.

How?
Here's a couple of working examples I use in production systems: