Chronic Bugs in their search API

Chronic Bugs in their search API

Hi,

I'd like to hear from other developers who are having problems using the Zoho CRM API

Very simple things, universally accepted search practices, simply don't work in the Zoho API. For instance, If you have a CRM Account with the name "My__Account" and the account name has 2 consecutive underscore characters, Zoho's API will fail with 207.  However, if you only have 1 underscore in the account name "My_Account", everything works great.

This bug is not isolated to the underscore. If you have an Account Name which accidentially has 2 consecutive spaces in the name "My  Account", the Zoho API will not find it. However, that same account does show up if you simply remove 1 of the spaces.

COQL is not any better at honoring simple globally accepted datbase rules for searching. It simply has different bugs.

I've contacted their Tech Support team multiple times over this problem and their back-end team does not seem to see any problems with it.

I started working in relational database systems in 1986, so I've had a good amount of experience in searching databasess. Through all that time I've learned that there are certain norms for searching, certain things which should work, like querying a database field with consecutive characters (like a space, or underscore), should not break the search query. 

Unfortunately, Zoho's backend dev team has ignored the globally acceptable practices.

something like this should work (my account name is an email address)

https://www.zohoapis.com/crm/v7/Accounts/search?criteria=(Account_Name:equals:my__email@domain.com)&fields=id,Account_Name

but this works
https://www.zohoapis.com/crm/v7/Accounts/search?criteria=(Account_Name:equals:my_email@domain.com)&fields=id,Account_Name