Reports are an invaluable feature for business apps. The built-in QWeb reports engine, available since version 8.0, is the default report engine. Reports are designed using QWeb templates to produce HTML documents that can then be converted to PDF form.
The Odoo built-in report engines have undergone significant changes. Before version 7.0, reports were based on the ReportLab library and used a specific markup syntax, RML. In version 7.0, the Webkit report engine was included in the core, allowing for reports to be designed using regular HTML instead. Finally, in version 8.0 this concept was taken a little further, and the QWeb templates became the main concept behind the built-in reporting engine.
This means we can conveniently leverage what we have learned about QWeb and apply it to create business reports. In this chapter, we will be adding a report to our to-do app, and will review the most important techniques to use with QWeb reports, including...