Namaskaram. At CubeYogi, we have been helping more than 100 businesses with their digital transformation journey. In our last close to 8 years of experience with Zoho, one key limitation we notice especially more and more in the recent times is that business scenarios demand a transaction based approach to their use cases.

To explain this, let me consider a business use case : For example, when an Estimate is created in Books, the business needs are such that two corresponding Opportunities have to be created in CRM and linked with this one Estimate, and then once the Opportunities are created, the Estimate status has to be changed. Now you can immediately see this is a specific series of events that are tightly linked with each other. In technical terms, as many of us know, this is called 'transaction'. So we need transaction based approach when doing operations between Zoho apps. 

I would go one step further and say we need 'atomic' transaction support in workflows/scripts. For the uninitiated, when we say 'atomic', it means it is a 'do or die'. That is either the full transaction completes successfully, or even if one step fails in the transaction, the entire transaction will be cancelled and all states will be reverted to how it was before the transaction began. 

Let's see what 'atomic transaction' means in the above scenario.

Say the Estimate is created in Books. Now, as per the business process, the script has to automatically create two corresponding Opportunities in CRM. Let's say it could create only one. The other Opportunity, let's assume, failed to create. So this means that the entire process has to be rolled back. That is, the other Opportunity has to be deleted (because one Opportunity doesn't make sense ; this use case needs definitely two) and then the Estimate might also have to be deleted or moved to 'Draft' status. This is what atomic transaction means. If it happens, everything in the process flow should happen. If something fails, then everything should be rolled back to the previous state.

Hope this makes sense. Love to hear your thoughts/experiences of similar business scenarios.