How To Create or Develop a Custom Module in Odoo

Nikhil Dhiman · 23 Sep 2019 · 3214 views

How To Create or Develop a Custom Module in Odoo

In Odoo Development, Odoo Modules can either add brand new business logic to an Odoo System or alter and extend existing business logic. A module can be created to add your country’s accounting rules to Odoo’s generic accounting support, while the next module adds support for real-time visualization of a bus fleet.

Everything in Odoo thus starts and ends with modules.

In this blog, we‘ll be focusing on how we can create or develop a custom module in odoo. Moreover, we'll also discuss how we can design the view in this module.

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Structure of a Module

An Odoo module can contain many elements like:

Objects/Models: Declared as Python classes, these resources are automatically persisted by Odoo based on their configuration

View Files: XML or CSV files declaring metadata (views or reports), configuration data (modules parameterization), demonstration data and more.

Controllers: Are used to handle requests from web browsers

Static Web Data: Images, CSS or JavaScript files used by the web interface or website.

In this case, we‘ll be focusing on how to generate a simple custom module using python models & xml views. So, let us start first by naming our custom module.

We can name this custom module whatever we want, but it should be related to the functioning of the module so that, it is user-friendly as well.

In this case, we are creating a module based on an e-commerce shop. So, let us name this folder an electronics shop.

This folder(module) will contain all our models & data files.

Now we need to create some sub-folders inside this module. The basic folders that can be used in a module are :

➢ Controllers

➢ Data

➢ Models

➢ Report

➢ Security

➢ Static

➢ Views

➢ Wizard

Now we need to keep in mind that for folders containing .py file, we need to create an __init__.py file inside our module and those folders also. The __init__.py file is used so that these .py files can be called first. So we need to create an __init__.py file inside our module.

Also, we need to create an __manifest__.py file inside our module. This manifest file as the name suggests, is a declaration for our module about its general information and is also used to call view/CSV/static files of the module.

We are not using controllers, reports, or wizards in this case. So the final structure of the module is something like this:

Now we‘ll discuss the structure of the __init__.py and __manifest__.py file.

The __init__ file is present inside our main module, and it is used for calling the below folders:

➢ controllers

➢ models

➢ wizard

The structure of our __init__.py file is something like this:

Now let us discuss about the structure of our __manifest__.py file:

In the above image, as you can see, we have declared the following parameters:

➢ Name: Name of the module to be displayed.

➢ Version: A version of the custom module with an optional Odoo version mention

➢ Author: Name of the owner or the person who created the module

➢ Website: The web address of the company/person.

➢ Summary

➢ Description: About the functioning of the module

➢ Depends: Here, we mention the name of the module on which our custom module depends.

➢ Data: In the data section, we have to specify all the .xml/.csv files here.

➢ Licence: Licence of the module.

➢ Installable, Application, and auto-install.

Now all the outer files & folder part is complete, so let‘s move forward to the basic core of our module. First of all, we need to create the __init__.py file inside our models‘ folder and also to call the .py file from our model.

This __init__.py file will look something like this, here product.py is our main model file :

Now let‘s move forward to our model file. Here we‘ll create a new model, or we can say a new table (in database terms) which will have fields(columns) for data entry.

There are various types of fields in Odoo to like:

➢ Character

➢ Integer

➢ Float

➢ Text

➢ Html

➢ Selection

and there are also some relational fields like Many2one, One2many & Many2many fields.

Here is the structure of our main model file, i.e., product.py file. So the file would look something like this.

In the above file, first of all, we import packages that we are going to use in our file.

For example, the basic API, fields, and models are mostly imported to use these inside the code. Any additional packages that you may want to use are also imported in the above file.

In this case, we have created some basic fields like name, price and also a selection field to select the product type, and also a relational field which is the company field.

Now, this relational field will connect us to the model mentioned inside the field syntax so that we get a list of the companies for our product, and we can choose anyone from them.

You can also create a Sequential field which, in other words, is also an auto incremental field which generate an auto incremental number every time a new record is generated so that we can generate a new number for every record (as shown in the image below & code for how to create your own sequential field shown above in python code (api.model) and XML code for that is also shown below)

This file needs to be put inside the data folder. And called inside your __manifest__.py file.

So this will generate a Sequence/Sequential Field like this:

Let us move to the part where we‘ll create XML file so that these fields will be displayed in the view.

These XML files are very important to display our fields or table data at the user interface so that it is easily accessible to the user.

So we‘ll first create an XML file inside our views folder. The fields we mention inside this XML file are visible on the interface.

After creating this XML file, we need to make sure to call this XML file inside the manifest file by giving the path for this file.

There are different types of views through which these fields can be displayed on the interface.

We Can Define Different Types of Views for our Model like:

➢ Form view

➢ Tree/List view

➢ Kanban View

➢ Graph view

➢ Search view

In this case, we have created a form, list & kanban view for our module.

FORM VIEW

Form view shows the page where a form is open of our model & its fields. Here you can enter data inside the fields.

The above code is of a form view. As the name suggests, this view provides us with the form of our model.

We can design it using various Html tags like groups, pages, etc., as we like. Here you can also add a tag <notebook>, Notebook gives multiple tabs on a single page in Odoo, in this case, it gives us two pages of Description and Product Details. This view gives us a final result of a form like this:

Now we can also create a Tree view for our model so that it gives a list view of our records.

TREE VIEW

Tree views can take additional attributes to customize their behavior further:

The Tree or List View looks like this on the interface:

KANBAN VIEW

A kanban view shows a set of cards possibly grouped in columns. Each card represents a record, and each column the values of an aggregation field.

The above code will make a kanban view like this:

SEARCH VIEW

A search view defines the search options that will be available in the views so that you can search in your records through this view based on the custom filters which you can add.

After you have created all views in the XML file, now the question arises of how you will access these views. We need to create a menu and action for our views to appear on the interface.

Actions and menus are regular records in the database, usually declared through data files. Actions can be triggered in three ways:

➢ by clicking on menu items (linked to specific actions)

➢ by clicking on buttons in views (if these are connected to actions)

➢ as contextual actions on the object

Because menus are somewhat complex to declare, there is a <menuitem> shortcut to declare an ir.ui.menu and connect it to the corresponding action more easily.

The above views are the action for our tree and form views.

Now we need to call these actions inside our <menuitem> so that when we click on our menu, these actions are called, which will eventually call our views.

This will create a parent menu named Electronic shop and a sub-menu named Products like this:

There is the primary way to create a custom module in Odoo. You can also add an icon to your custom module. Just create a folder named Static inside your module.

Inside this folder, create another folder named src, inside this folder, create another folder named “images“ and put your image as icon.png. This image will then be displayed as the icon of your custom module in Odoo.

Now in Odoo12, we need to create an ir.model.access.csv file for the model that we create so that a user can add, edit or delete a record from that model.

We can also create the record rules for our custom module, to limit the rights of certain data to a particular user.