Zoho Developer Community Monthly Digest – May 2025

Zoho Developer Community Monthly Digest – May 2025



Hello everyone,

Welcome to this month’s Zoho Developer Community Digest! From fresh product insights to hands-on tech sessions and standout community threads, there's plenty here to keep your ideas flowing and your skills sharp. Be sure to explore our updated resource hub for even more learning. Grab your coffee and dive into the latest from the Zoho developer community!

The developer community chat room is shifting from Zoho Cliq to a new space on Zoho CommunitySpaces, and it comes with a iOS and Android mobile apps! Or sign up here and use the web version. (Using Zoho credentials? Just sign in—no need to fill the form.)

Why the change? This new space brings all Zoho users together, lets you follow threads and people, sends personalized notifications, and has a much smoother experience overall. We’ve been envisioning this for a while, so we’re thrilled it’s live.

Check out these videos to get started!

Upcoming Events

Extensions 101

TitleZoho Books – Custom Actions
Date: Jun 12, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM IST & 8:00 PM IST – Registration link

This series aims to guide developers through the process of building extensions for various Zoho products using the Zoho Developer platform, Sigma. Our previous sessions in this series covered extension development for multiple Zoho products and highlighted the platform's key capabilities for developing efficient extensions. Register for the upcoming sessions, where we'll delve deep into developing extensions for Zoho products like CRM, Books, and Desk.

Zoho Community Developer Bootcamps 2025 – India

We're bringing two sets of in-person developer bootcamps across 7 cities in India—one for Catalyst by Zoho, and another for building Extensions using the Sigma platform! We're super excited to meet you in person... and some of you, once again!

Creator Tech Connect:

Title: Building Data Relationships using Subforms in Zoho Creator
Date: June 12, 2025
APAC & ANZ: 11 AM to 12 PM IST - Registration Link
EMEA: 4 PM to 5 PM IST - Registration Link
Americas: 9 PM to 10 PM IST - Registration Link

Creator's tech connect series would comprise of technical sessions that provide immersive training on the key essentials and technical nuances of building a solution in Zoho Creator. This is a great opportunity for our developer community to stay informed about Creator's new feature releases, product roadmap, best practices to follow while scripting in deluge, new deluge concepts, and cloud functions. In our previous session, we discussed about lookup fields in Zoho Creator. In the upcoming session, we will explore building data relationships using Subforms in Zoho Creator.

Zoho Developer Hangout – Episode 23

Topic: Custom Logs – A Developer’s Ally in Zohosphere
Date: Jun 17, 2025
Time: 10 AM IST – Registration link

How do you debug when a client says, “I clicked something… and now it’s not working”, but can’t explain what happened? In this session, Deepa, a self-taught Zoho developer and homepreneur, will walk you through how she builds custom logs inside client accounts to capture real-time activity, make issues easier to trace, and reduce stress. This session is perfect for any developer working in client automations or eager to learn best practices while coding.

Zoho CRM APIs

Title: Part 7 – OpenAPI Specification 3.0.0
Date: Jun 19, 2025
Time: 10 AM & 9 PM IST – Registration link

Zoho CRM now provides an official OpenAPI 3.0 specification for its REST APIs, designed for developers and solution architects. In this session, you’ll learn how to instantly generate client SDKs in multiple programming languages, test APIs visually through Swagger UI, maintain consistent integrations with auto-generated, versioned requests and responses, and explore modules, operations, request/response formats, and error codes — all in a single, machine-readable file.

Zoho CRM Developer Series – Queries

Date: June 26, 2025
Time: 10 AM IST & 9 PM IST – Registration link

In this session, you'll learn how to create a query in CRM and use variables, serialization and schema management, along with a use case demo.

Building AI-powered, low-code apps with Zoho Creator

Title: CoCreator – Generative AI-Assisted Application Development
Date: July 3, 2025 – Registration link

Learn how Zoho Creator’s AI-powered assistant, CoCreator (powered by Zia), helps you build apps, automate workflows, and optimize code rapidly—so you can focus on creating impactful business solutions faster.

Learning Table Series

Title: Zoho Creator for Logistics Management
Date: July 3, 2025
APAC & ANZ: 11 AM to 12 PM IST - Registration Link
EMEA: 4 PM to 5 PM IST - Registration Link
Americas: 9 PM to 10 PM IST - Registration Link
 

We designed this series to provide users with valuable insights and knowledge about Creator's capabilities in various business use cases and applications. This year as well, we have adopted the 12 Months 12 Industries concept. Every month, we will focus on a specific industry, illustrating its unique processes with real-time business scenarios and how to make best use of Creator for that industry. Our recent webinar on Creator for visitor management was a success, and during the upcoming session we'll be exploring Creator for Logistics Management.

Resource Spotlight

We've consolidated all the resources from the developer community learning series into a centralized hub for your convenient access. Consider bookmarking our Zoho Developer Community website to stay informed about the latest updates in the developer community.

Community Discussions

Zoho Developer Forum

  • A developer wanted to extract just the first word from a name like “David Beckham” in Deluge. Some suggested using getPrefix, others went the list-splitting route. The beauty? Each approach worked—with its own twist. What made one method stand out more than the others? The community had thoughts…

  • Looking for clarity on field types and criteria for zoho.cr.searchRecords, @Charles-Adrien noticed the official docs left out quite a bit. @Anonymous User quickly filled the gap, and fellow devs jumped in with practical insights—especially around API version differences. One reply, in particular, offered a lightbulb moment...

  • @Jesus needed to update a date field from the 'Cargo' module to the 'Deals' module in Zoho CRM. With step-by-step help from @Ishwarya SG, a fix from our MVP @Nik, and a surprise twist involving Rollup fields for a similar case, this thread became a great showcase of layered problem-solving. But it’s the final solution that made many devs stop and take notes...
  • @Michele's workflow was being... stubborn. One rule updated a field, but the next rule didn’t even blink. After some helpful nudges from @Anonymous User and a sharp fix from MVP Nik, the floodgates opened—more devs, more automation drama, and a treasure chest of workarounds. The final fix was so simple, it almost felt like the CRM was just being petty.

Developers ZUG Conversations

Community Spotlight

Zoho Developer Hangout

As a continuation of featuring a ZDH presenter each month, this time, we are delighted to introduce and appreciate the 19th episode presenter @Christopher Mowers. Explore this post to discover the knowledge and insights he shared with the community.

Cliq Contributors

We want to express our sincere appreciation to all our community contributors. Your commitment, expertise, and the time you invest are invaluable to the community. 



Make sure to follow the digest every month for the most recent updates and conversations. Stay connected and participate in the forums and the Cliq channel to be featured in the upcoming month's digest. Wishing you all an amazing month ahead!

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