What?
A follow on from my article Zoho Creator: Create a Widget which uses JavaScript back from 2020 with a few adjustments now in 2024.

This widget will only work within Zoho Creator. If you want a solution which sits on an external website and which talks to Zoho, then setup an externally hosted web app with the usual JavaScript frameworks and have it send AJAX commands to a server which reads/writes information to your Zoho instance via API. No need for the Zoho Widget SDK.

Why?
At time of print, I felt the documentation was a little sparse on how to connect a JS widget to the data held in Zoho Creator. Having this example for future use might save me some time. The following is the early version of a JS widget used for a customer and before I added all the layers of complexity, I want to have here an example that demonstrates a basic search on a table of data and returns one record as a result.

The use-case here is that we are enhancing a quote builder form in Zoho Creator. The JS widget (aka the Quote Builder) will need to post a new quote to the system as well as show previous orders.

How?
We're going to use the Zoho Extension SDK. You should refer to my previous linked article but the revised instructions here should also help. Then lastly, I'll post the snippet of code using in the widget to connect to Zoho based on a parameter passed in the URL that a Zoho Creator Page can receive and pass to the JS widget.

What?
This is a quick article on generating a file with the Zoho Deluge function .toFile() and uploading it to a file upload field within Zoho Creator.

Why?
The use-case here is that we want a file to be hosted within Zoho Creator for use by a JS widget that will download the CSV (in this case a Text *.txt) file for use by a dynamic auto-suggester dropdown; one of those fancy ones that includes photos and a bit of fuzzy logic.

What?
This is an article to document how to produce a report which when exported to PDF will display images without a user wall.

Why?
Our client needs to send a report to suppliers that include photos of the faulty products. These display fine in a Zoho Creator report and even show up on the preview when exporting to PDF. But when you download the PDF and view this outside of the Zoho instances, the photos don't display.

This is because the photos were just links in the Zoho Creator image field, links to another Zoho app that is behind a user wall (ie. login and password as a Zoho User).

How?
So I'll go over what happens in the real world process; then cover some technical information; and even include the function that makes it work:

What?
A quick article on how I resolved this error and how the online forums and documentation did not.

Why?
I don't often do this to create a Creator record but I'm going to use the shortcode function zoho.creator.createRecord() and wanted to update the first name of a name field but I was getting the following error:

{ "code": 2945, "description": "EXTRA_KEY_FOUND_IN_JSON" }

How?
So the quick answer is to build a nested map in your request instead of using the Creator/JavaScript period/dot character...

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.

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...

What?
A really quick article on how to hide these using CSS... at least until Zoho have this as a setting using the GUI.

Why?
Our use-case is that we have a subform which gets autopopulated with a list of services. The client does not want their operations team adding/deleting rows and instead simply specifying quantity (defaulting to zero) alongside each serviceable item.

How?
So at time of print, this is the only way I know: add a note field to inject some CSS into it and hide the delete icon as well as the "Add new row" link.

What?
This is a very quick article with a code snippet on how I added to a multi-lookup field.

Why?
Using a multi-line or text is possibly a quicker solution and when using a desktop interface, you can parse the multi-line into a nice HTML table. But on a mobile device, it's somewhat better to use the built-in interfaces provided by Zoho Creator.

What I really needed was a way to display the line items from a package slip taken from Zoho Inventory. I'd prefer if it was included in the list view or a Zoho Creator report.

How?
We would think it similar to a picklist/dropdown where you simply add an option to the picklist and then specify which of the options are selected. In this case, simply giving it the IDs should work... but it doesn't.