Zoho CRM APIs: The Ultimate Guide

Zoho CRM offers API (Application Programming Interface) that allows you to integrate CRM with third-party applications such as accounting, e-commerce, self-service portals, etc. At the time when you work with the Zoho CRM API, you must ensure that you are using the latest version of the API.

With API versioning, you can create new API endpoints while adding functionality to them which also makes sure that the API is easily accessible to all the third-party applications and integrations for continuous usage.

Zoho CRM’s API allows you to fetch important CRM data from the Zoho CRM account. You can get your records, add them or remove them, search and even update your records. The Zoho CRM comes with many modules including contacts, potentials, campaigns, tasks, events, cases, solutions, price books, vendors, purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, etc.

Zoho CRM Rest APIs:

Zoho CRM comes with standard modules including Accounts, Leads, Deals, Forecasts, Activities, Contacts, and so on. With the use of Zoho CRM Rest API, you can easily retrieve the list of all the available modules from the Get List of Modules API.

You can easily refer to the API in the JSON data at the time you access the resource. Each field, module, and related list is going to have an API name which you can use easily in the third-party integrations. For instance, if you wish to access the module titled Leads then you can use “Leads” which can be the api_name each time you access the resource. The Zoho CRM can easily generate API names while also creating custom modules, custom fields, and related list labels. You cannot change the API Names for any default modules including fields and related lists. Instead, you can easily change API names for custom modules, related lists, and fields.
The formed API name only contains numbers, alphabets, and even underscores. The API name must start with an alphabet and must not have two consecutive underscores or end with an underscore.
You must refer to Response Structure for details about JSON keys, descriptions, and values of the available modules. You can use the sample response of every module as the input when you insert, update, and upsert a record in the corresponding module.

Bulk Read API:

The Bulk Read API enables you to fetch a large set of data. The API is extremely useful when you need to export a large amount of data or even take a backup of data without creating a big impact on the API limits.

This is usually an asynchronous API which means that the response to the request is not usually available instantly. You are going to be notified of the callback URL whenever the data is ready to be downloaded and you can also choose the job status periodically.

The first step is to create a POST API call by providing the module, a list of fields to be exported along with criteria that can be used for filtering records. This will help in creating an asynchronous job and it will also return a unique identifier which can be the reference of a request.
In case you need the system to notify you automatically on the job completion then you can also offer the callback URL when you create a bulk read job. Otherwise, you can also choose to check the status of this job at periodic intervals by using a GET API call using the Job ID.
After the job is completed, the download_url can be available in the result attribute of the response of API. You can also download the result of the job by calling download_url. This is how a zip file will get downloaded which will also contain the CSV or ICS file in it.

Notification API:

The notification APIs enable you to get instant notifications anytime an action is performed on the module records. The system easily notifies you about the event on the URL that is provided. It is also easy to allow notifications on the basis of operations such as create, update, and delete.

For instance, let us think that a user wishes to get notified about the create operation that can be performed on a specific module. Anytime a contact gets created in the Zoho CRM, the system will be notifying the user to notify the URL.

You can also create a unique ID for each module for ensuring that the notification is coming from a particular channel. This can be done by setting the expiry time for instant notifications for all channels. Moreover, there is also an option to disable the notifications anytime.

The notification APIs enable you to enable notifications, get notification details, update notification details, update specific information of a notification, disable notifications, and also disable specific notifications.

Query API:

Another API used for custom applications is called the CRM Object Query Language which is based on the SQL syntax. It allows the users to write queries for getting records from Zoho CRM and use field API names instead of column names and module API names rather than table names.

This API can be used for filtering and fetching records on the basis of some factors instead of creating custom views and passing the Custom View ID as a parameter in the request. With the use of this API, you can easily retrieve over 200 records.

COQL supports just the SELECT query with some clauses such as WHERE, ORDER, FROM, BY, LIMIT, AND OFFSET.
COQL keywords must not be case-sensitive. SELECT can be the same as select.
The system sorts the record in ascending order on the basis of record ID in case the order is not included in the query.
The default value for LIMIT can be 200 and the OFFSET value can be 0.

Conclusion:

Zoho CRM API allows developers to build custom applications for managing enterprise operations. They offer easy integration of Zoho CRM in almost all platforms that a business uses and you never have to worry about the development or IT challenges stressing your operations.

The developer platform offers low code development along with microservices for professional code for automation, enterprise-wide data integration and the formation of custom web and mobile solutions.

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