What?
This is an article to document how I got a client's eBay to notify the seller every time a buyer bought a fixed price item. This uses the Trading API even though I'm aiming for the Platform Notifications API...

Why?
A follow on from my article Zoho Creator: Push to eBay Listings. I have a Creator app that needs to receive the orders from an eBay account as soon as the order or transaction is made on a Fixed Price item.

How?
So first of all, you'll need an access token: please visit my article and read the first part on how to get a valid Access Token for the rest of these steps. Once we have an access token, we will check what notifications already exist (if any), and then we will create a function that subscribes the application so that any order is sent to a URL, specifically a CRM REST API function that will forward the payload data to Zoho Creator (Yes you will need CRM version Enterprise or Zoho One [that supports functions] for this process).

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What?
This article serves as a best practice and reminder to myself on how to stop endless loops from happening in Creator and crashing the application. This is more for complex Creator forms which have workflows triggered from many deltas/changes.

Why?
Some clients have referred to this as the "spinning circle of death": they load up a Creator application or change a field and there will be a spinning icon indicating that the field has triggered an automation/workflow but it keeps spinning and doesn't stop. The app page will ultimately timeout and when reloading the form it simply displays a blank page. Their only workaround is wait about 30 seconds or more for the loop to automatically cut out and then they can use the interface again only to find it may crash again.


In the background and from a developers understanding: field1 is told to update field2 when field1 is changed. When field2 is changed, it is told to update field1. This causes a recursive or endless loop where each field triggers an workflow/automation, even if the value has not changed, to modify another field and vice-versa. This can get more complex when there are a lot of fields in the mix.

How?
I'm using this article to go through various methods I tried to prevent this from happening:

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What?
This is an article to document how I connect a Zoho Creator app to push a product to your eBay listings. By writing this article, I can refine this method as it took me a while to figure out.

Why?
I have a client who has a Zoho Creator app and wants to push their products to their eBay account. Previously using Zoho Inventory, we realized that this only syncs 1 way not 2 as per the documentation. In that items sold on eBay sync to Zoho Inventory by means of an eBay Sales Order, and only every 4 hours. We needed something that pushes out to eBay and updates the eBay listing. To complicate matters, the client also uses Shopify which means that when an item is sold by eBay, it would take 4 hours until all systems were aware. 1 customer buying the item off eBay and another customer buying the same item off Shopify would be problematic if the client only has 1 of the item in stock. See my Shopify article to get a webhook response within 5 seconds.

How?
At the time of print, the Trading API of eBay is deprecated and reaches end of life at the end of this year (2021). In this demonstration, we're going to use the Listings API, follow the OAuth 2.0 process to get an access token and use it to create an eBay listing.

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What?
A very quick article to show pushing the date and time to ZohoCRM or ZohoCreator.

Why?
You may have received an error that goes something like:

datatype: datetime

How?
Here are some formatting examples:

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What?
This is an article for training purposes. I'm pretty sure there is official documentation on how to do this but I thought I'd write this article to make it simpler for new developers to follow and learn as a quick point of reference.

Why?
Some clients systems will presume that they don't need their sales or CRM users to think about tax and probably manage it in Zoho Books leaving it to their finance team. This is a quick run-through for a standard setup to include UK tax/vat.

How?
Here's a quick step-by-step to follow:

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What?
A really quick article for anyone experiencing the same issue: As a super admin in CRM, I am denied permission to access the Quote Conversion Mapping page...

Why?
I wanted to map a billing street 2 and shipping street 2 from the Account module to the Quote module, then on convert, to map these to the Sales Order in CRM. As my client's sales team would only create sales orders in CRM and don't use the invoice module (that's for their finance team using ZohoBooks), we disabled the CRM Invoice module.

How?
Therein lies the reason. For the quote conversion mapping, it needs the CRM Invoice module as well.

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What?
A quick article to remind me of the regex to change a date from the format dd/MM/yyyy to yyyy-MM-dd.

Why?
Irrespective of server, organization or user settings, the date handling can vary. If we are getting a date from a CSV or other external source as "dd/MM/yyyy", how do we guarantee that the system will understand the date correctly?

How?
It may be that when obtaining a date string and applying the method .toString("dd/MM/yyyy") is dependent on the settings. But making a date into a SQL format or from largest denominator to smallest in "yyyy-MM-dd" will usually handle the date better.

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What?
A quick article to remind me how to quickly get a field from a user's settings based on the owner of a record.

Why?
A client had added a custom lookup field to the users settings called "Division" (similar to team name) and wanted any Opportunity record to have a field showing the user's Division. This would help in reporting later down the line.

How?
The following code snippet will get the Opportunity/Deal/Potential record details, then get the Owner frrom the CRM users table, find the value of the custom field and search for this (if it is a lookup to a module - only returns as string), and updates the Opportunity/Deal/Potential record.

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What?
A quick article to explain why the full name might appear in the last name field in Zoho CRM.

Why?
We had a customer report the issue that sometimes the full name of a contact was appearing in the last name field and creating a contact called "Firstname Firstname Lastname" (eg. "Joel Joel Lipman" - when Joel is not my middle name).

How?
This is a setting that is enabled by default in Zoho Bookings as documented in the official documentation. Not sure why anyone would want to leave this enabled without applying the fix.

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What?
An article so that I don't spend so long in trying to find sales persons in Zoho Books.

Why?
My use case is that I want to create a Sales Order in ZohoBooks based on one in ZohoCRM and wanted to assign the sales person.

How?
So after an hour or so trying to get the Zoho.books.getRecords() function to filter the sales persons, I gave up and used a for each loop instead.

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What?
This is an article to demonstrate how to handle commas in a CSV file that were enclosed between two double-quotes. I've added to this the handling of new lines or carriage returns in between a pair of double-quotes.

Why?
Our use case is that we were trying to loop through rows of a CSV file which contained addresses which in turn contained commas. Saving this as a CSV and asking Deluge to parse the data in the appropriate columns was not working as expected.

How?
The quick answer is a regex that will replace any commas between two quotes with a custom string, to be exact:

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What?
A quick article to document a method of looping through all the records of a module and processing these with the ability auto-resume without processing the same record twice.

Why?
Whether you have a few hundred records, or a few hundred thousand records, we sometimes want to write a function that will check each record and mark it so that the process doesn't repeat on records that have already been checked.

Some solutions have worked in the past where you could simply add a checkbox and do a search where this value is false; but lately this hasn't been working for me. To this end, I have thought of an alternative that I now use frequently in client systems.

How?
The gist is that we add a checkbox called "Processed" which will have a datatype Boolean. Our function will then loop through each record and do what it has to do. The workaround here is that we order this by modified time. When the checkbox gets updated, this modifies the record and puts it at the bottom of the list.

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