Odoo is a powerful open source platform for business applications. On top of it a suite of closely integrated applications was built, covering all business areas from CRM and Sales to Accounting and Stocks. Odoo has a dynamic and growing community around it, constantly adding features, connectors, and additional business apps.
Odoo Development Essentials provides a step-by-step guide to Odoo development to quickly climb the learning curve and become productive in the Odoo application platform.
The first three chapters aim to make the reader comfortable with Odoo, the basic techniques to set up a development environment, and with the module development approach and workflow.
The next five chapters explain in detail several development areas used in modules: data files, models, views, business logic, and QWeb.
The two final chapters guide you through integrating Odoo applications with external applications and discuss what to consider when deploying your Odoo instance for production use.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Odoo Development, covers setting up a development environment, installing Odoo from source, and learning how to manage Odoo server instances.
Chapter 2, Building Your First Odoo Application, guides you through the creation of your first Odoo module, covering all the different layers involved: models, views, and business logic.
Chapter 3, Inheritance – Extending Existing Applications, explains the inheritance mechanisms and uses them to create extension modules that add or modify features on other existing modules.
Chapter 4, Data Serialization and Module Data, covers the most used Odoo data file formats, XML and CSV, external identifiers, and how to use data files in modules and in data import/export.
Chapter 5, Models – Structuring the Application Data, discusses in detail the Model layer with the types of models and fields available, including relational and computed fields.
Chapter 6, Views – Designing the User Interface, covers the View layer, explaining in detail several types of views and all the elements that can be used to create dynamic and intuitive user interfaces.
Chapter 7, ORM Application Logic – Supporting Business Processes, introduces programming business logic on the server side, exploring the ORM concepts and features, and also explains how to use wizards for sophisticated user interaction.
Chapter 8, QWeb – Creating Kanban Views and Reports, goes over the Odoo QWeb templates, using them to create rich kanban boards and HTML-based reports.
Chapter 9, External API – Integration with Other Systems, explains how to use Odoo server logic from external applications, and introduces a popular client programming library that can also be used as a command-line client.
Chapter 10, Deployment Checklist – Going Live, shows you how to prepare a server for production prime time and explains what configuration should be taken care of and how to configure an Nginx reverse proxy for improved security and scalability.
We will install our Odoo server in an Ubuntu or Debian system, but we expect you to use the operating system and programming tools of your choice, be it Windows, Macintosh, or any other.
We will provide some guidance on setting up a virtual machine with Ubuntu Server. You should choose the virtualization software to be used, such as VirtualBox or VMware Player, both available for free. If you are using Ubuntu or Debian workstation, no virtual machine will be needed.
This book is targeted at developers with experience in developing business applications who are willing to quickly become productive with Odoo.
You are expected to have an understanding of MVC application design and knowledge of the Python programming language.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "It also needs to be Python importable, so it must also have a __init__.py file."
A block of code is set as follows:
{
'name': 'To-Do Application',
'description': 'Manage your personal Tasks with this module.',
'author': 'Daniel Reis',
'depends': ['mail'],
'application': True,
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ mkdir ~/odoo-dev/custom-addons
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the Update Modules List option."
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