Chapter 12. External API – Integrating with Other Systems

The Odoo server also provides an external API, which is used by its web client and is also available for other client applications.

In this chapter, we will learn how to use the Odoo external API from our own client programs. Any programming language can be used, as long as it has support for XML-RPC or JSON-RPC protocols. As an example, the official documentation provides code samples for four popular programming languages: Python, PHP, Ruby, and Java.

To avoid introducing additional languages the reader might not be familiar with, here we will focus on Python-based clients, although the techniques to handle the RPC calls also apply to other programming languages.

We will describe how to use the Odoo RPC calls, and then use that to build a simple To‑Do desktop app using Python.

Finally, we will introduce the ERPPeek client. It is a Odoo client library, that can be used as a convenient abstraction layer for the...