Developing Module.markdown

E. Developing Odoo Module

In this tutorial, we will be developing a module called "To-Do Application", and the module will follow the Odoo way of developing modules.

Let's run through the development:

Step 1: Create a Directory and name the Directory "todo_app"

Step 2: Create an __init__.py file

Step 3: Create a __manifest__.py file and add the following:

{
    'name': 'To-Do Application',
    'description': 'Manage your personal To-Do tasks.',
    'author': 'Daniel Reis',
    'depends': ['base'],
    'application': True,
    }

Step 4: Install the Module

F. Enhancing To-do App

F1. Creating Data Model

The Odoo development guidelines state that the Python files for models should be placed inside a models subdirectory. So let's create a todo_model.py and __init__.pyand file in the model directory of the todo_app module.

Add the following content to the todo_model.py file:

from odoo import models, fields

class TodoTask(models.Model):
    _name = 'todo.task'
    _description = 'To-do Task'
    name = fields.Char('Description', required=True)
    is_done = fields.Boolean('Done?')
    active = fields.Boolean('Active?', default=True)

The first line is a Python code import statement, making available the models and fields objects from the Odoo core.

The second line declares our new model. It's a class derived from models.Model .

The next line sets the _name attribute defining the identifier that will be used throughout Odoo to refer to this model. Note that the actual Python class name, TodoTask in this case, is meaningless to other Odoo modules. The _name value is what will be used as an identifier.

Right now, this file is not yet used by the module. We must tell Python to load it with the module in the __init__.py file. Let's edit it to add the following line:

from . import todo_model

That's it! For our Python code changes to take effect, the server instance needs to be restarted

F2. Creating View Layer

The view layer describes the user interface. Views are defined using XML, which is used by the web client framework to generate data-aware HTML views.

The Odoo development guidelines states that the XML files defining the user interface should be placed inside a views/ subdirectory.

Let's start creating the user interface for our To-Do application.

Adding menu items

Now that we have a model to store our data, we should make it available on the user interface. For that, we should add a menu option to open the To-do Task model so that it can be used.

Create the views/todo_menu.xml file to define a menu item and the action performed by it:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<odoo>
    <!-- Action to open To-do Task list -->
    <act_window id="action_todo_task" name="To-do Task" res_model="todo.task" view_mode="tree,form" />
    
    <!-- Menu item to open To-do Task list -->
    <menuitem id="menu_todo_task" name="Todos" action="action_todo_task" />
</odoo>

The user interface, including menu options and actions, is stored in database tables. The XML file is a data file used to load those definitions into the database when the module is installed or upgraded. The preceding code is an Odoo data file, describing two records to add to Odoo:

The element defines a client-side window action that will open the todo.task model with the tree and form views enabled, in that order.

The defines a top menu item calling the action_todo_task action, which was defined before.

Both elements include an id attribute. This id attribute also called an XML ID , is very important: it is used to uniquely identify each data element inside the module, and can be used by other elements toreference it. In this case, the element needs to reference the action to process, and needs to make use of the ID for that.

Our module does not yet know about the new XML data file. This is done by adding it to the data attribute in the __manifest__.py file. It holds the list of files to be loaded by the module. Add this attribute to the manifest's dictionary:

'data': ['views/todo_menu.xml'],

Now we need to upgrade the module again for these changes to take effect. Go to the Todos top menu and you should see our new menu option available.

Even though we haven't defined our user interface view, clicking on the Todos menu will open an automatically generated form for our model, allowing us to add and edit records.

Odoo is nice enough to automatically generate them so that we can start working with our model right away.

So far, so good! Let's improve our user interface now.