Odoo provides a rapid application development framework that's particularly suited to building business applications. This type of application is usually concerned with keeping business records, centered around create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. Not only does Odoo makes it easy to build this type of application, it also provides rich components to create compelling user interfaces, such as kanban, calendar, and graph views.
This book is organized into five parts. We start by providing an overview of the Odoo framework, setting up a development environment, and building our first Odoo application. Being generally familiar with the main Odoo components, we will dive, in more detail, into each of the three main application layers—models, business logic, and views. Finally, our application will need to be deployed to a production environment and maintained. That's what is covered in the final chapter of the book.
In this chapter, we will quickly get into the action, exploring the Odoo internals directly from the web user interface, even before having set up our local development environment.
In this chapter, we will do the following:
- Introduce the learning project used in this chapter, the to-do application.
- Understand the Odoo architecture, editions, and releases, to have the essential context and insights relevant to working with Odoo.
- Prepare a basic Odoo work environment, so that we can work on an example project and learn by experience. Several options are proposed:
- Using Odoo online
- Using the Windows all-in-one installer
- Using Docker
- Enable the developer mode, to make available in the user interface the tools we will be using.
- Modify an existing model to add a field, a quick introduction to a common customization.
- Create a custom data model, to add new data structures for your applications.
- Configure access security, to allow specific user groups to access the application features.
- Create menu items, to make the new data model available in the user interface.
- Create list, form, and search views, the basic building blocks for the user interface.
We will learn by example, and the next section will introduce the project we will use for this.