I have almost finished building the main processes in my app. I was led to believe by the documentation that the customer portal would be perfect for enabling customers to view their data in a restricted fashion. That's how it's documented.

However, when one goes to utilize this feature you will find out quickly that they are very literal as Customer's can truly only see the data they've entered in your Zoho app (using the default configuration), but none of the data you've added for them! This is because the only true way to restrict data dynamically is to include a Report Criteria which utilizes the Added_User field equaling the zoho.loginuser (who's the current Customer Portal logged in user). 

The problem with this is that we add a number of records on behalf of our Customers. These records should be able to be viewed by the Customer as well as the ones they add themselves. 

I am quite surprised this was not considered as a core requirement of Zoho Creator. 

This being said, the work around I've found is to map my Customer's to their Account (like IBM, SalesForce, Home Depot, etc) then perform a Lookup on the Customer by way of the Account for every record I want to display to the Customer in the portal. I then filter by Form.Customer == zoho.loginuser. The issue with this is if I need multiple users for each Account, like IBM needs 10 Customer accounts. If I have to add a new Customer account I'd have to go back and perform Lookups on all my old records. Thus, I'm limited to one Customer account and I must tie it via Lookup to every record I want to show that Customer.

Surely there must be a better way to do this? I am just trying to show IBM all data from Form's that has Account == "IBM", this is really the core logic.

Please help, thank you!!!