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  • Zoho Desk error: The app returned `{"message":"The data is invalid due to validation restrictions-/contactId"}

I am trying to setup a Zap between Toky and Zoho Desk.  Toky is a Business phone system.  
It is supposed to connect to Zoho Desk by itself but it doesn’t, their support team is trying to work out why.
In the mean time I thought I would use Zapier since it can also do these things.

I setup a Zap that creates a ticket in Zoho Desk whenever a new voicemail is received in Toky.
When I test this it give me the error below.
I have tried taking everything back to the bare basics and using the default suggestions and it still errors.

Can anyone help?

This is the error I am getting.

The app returned `{"message":"The data is invalid due to validation restrictions-/contactId"} What happened: Executing creates.create_ticket.operation.perform with bundle {"message":"The data is invalid due to validation restrictions-/contactId"} Console logs: Custom field URL ---> https://desk.zoho.:censored:6:a6d27e96e6:/api/v1/myForm?orgId=7002795106&module=tickets&departmentId=13553000000012806 Response Code : 200 Cust fields {} Add Ticket {"departmentId":"13553000000012806","contactId":"2023-01-25T14:36:53+11:00","subject":"+61-400-455-924","customFields":{}} ` as error, which we cannot read.

Hi @Laserau77, welcome to the Community! 👋

Ah, I think I’ve spotted the issue here. The Contact ID field has a date/time value selected:
a70bbb0c501d7683494d7c2aa75320c6.png
For IDs we’d usually expect to have an ID number of some sort, not a date/time value. So I’m thinking that’s why it’s saying it’s invalid and erroring. 

To solve this:

  1. Try adding a Find Contact (ZohoDesk) search action to your Zap. That action should allow the Zap to search for the relevant contact and find it’s ID. More on how to use search actions can be found here: Search for existing data in Zaps
  2. Then on your Create Ticket action, in the Contact field, you’d choose the Custom value option and select the ID field from the previous Find Contact search action. You can find out more about using custom values here: Add custom values to dropdown menu fields in Zaps


Can you give that a try and let us know if that fixes it? 

Thanks for the reply.  Yes that did the trick.
None of the options available for Contact really suit what we are doing.
The Extra Search option available also doesn’t really suit what we need as a mandatory field is email and a lot of the time we wont know the email if it is a new caller.
Have you got any suggestions of what we can use in the Contact ID section?

Hi @Laserau77!

The create ticket action in Zoho Desk needs a Contact ID (you can’t create a ticket without one). Do you get any identifying information from the Toky trigger that you could use to create a contact? 

If you use the Find contact step and add the option to create the contact if one isn’t found then you could create a contact using the information from Toky. 

In both cases, as you don’t have an email address, you could perhaps create a fake one for each call. For example, you could create email addresses that were aphone-number]@tokycall.com and use that in Zoho.

​I hope that's clear, please let us know if you have any questions!

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