This books contains 14 chapters, organized into five parts: introduction, models, business logic, views, and deployment.
The first part introduces the Odoo framework, explains how to set up your development environment, and provides a tutorial including a thorough, step-by-step creation of a new Odoo module:
Chapter 1, Quick Start Using the Developer Mode, visually introduces the Odoo development concepts by walking through the creation of an Odoo application directly from the user interface, a simple to-do tracking application. Instructions are given to set up Odoo in our workstation, but an existing Odoo installation, or an Odoo.com instance, can be used, so no local setup is required.
Chapter 2, Preparing the Development Environment, explains how to install Odoo from source code and how to set up the development environment to be used throughout the book. We choose to install Odoo in an Ubuntu environment, and, with Windows 10, we can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to achieve this.
Chapter 3, Your First Odoo Application, provides a step-by-step guide to the creation of our first Odoo module, a book catalog for a Library app. While the example is simple, it covers all the different layers and components that can be involved in an Odoo application: models, business logic, backend views, and web frontend views.
Chapter 4, Extending Modules, explains the available inheritance mechanisms and how to use them to create extension modules, adding or modifying features from other existing add-on modules.
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The second part of the book introduces the models responsible for the data model structures around which the application is built:
Chapter 5, Import, Export, and Module Data, addresses the usage of data files in Odoo and their role in modules to load data and configurations to the database. It covers the XML and CSV data file formats, the external identifier concept, how to use data file in modules, and data import/export operations.
Chapter 6, Models – Structuring the Application Data, discusses the model layer in detail, introducing the framework's Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), the different types of models available, and the field types, including relational and computed fields.
In the third part, we explain how to write the business logic layer on top of the models—the controller component of the architecture. This includes the built-in ORM functions, used to manipulate the data in the models, and social features used for messages and notifications:
Chapter 7, Recordsets – Working with Model Data, introduces the concepts and features of ORMs, how to query and ready to read data from models, how to manipulate recordsets, and how to write changes on model data.
Chapter 8, Business Logic – Supporting Business Processes, explores programming business logic on the server side to manipulate data and implement specific business rules. It also explains how to use wizards for more sophisticated user interaction. The built-in social features, messages, chatter, followers, and channels, are addressed, as well as testing and debugging techniques.
Chapter 9, External API – Integrating with Other Systems, shows how to implement external Odoo applications by implementing a command-line client that interacts with our Odoo server. There are several alternative client programming libraries available, which are introduced and used to implement our showcase client utility.
The fourth part explores the view layer and the several technologies that can be used for the user interface:
Chapter 10, Backend Views – Design the User Interface, covers the web client's view layer, explaining the several types of views in detail and all the elements that can be used to create dynamic and intuitive user interfaces.
Chapter 11, Kanban Views and Client-Side QWeb, keeps working with the web client, but introduces Kanban views and explains the QWeb templates used to design the Kanban board elements.
Chapter 12, Reports and Server-Side QWeb, discusses using the QWeb-based report engine and everything needed to generate printer-friendly PDF reports.
Chapter 13, Creating Website Frontend Features, introduces Odoo website development, including web controller implementations and using QWeb templates to build frontend web pages.
Finally, the fifth part covers deployment and maintenance practices. Some special considerations, not relevant to development environments, need to be taken into account when deploying for production use:
Chapter 14, Deploying and Maintaining Production Instances, shows us how to prepare a server for production use, explaining what configuration should be taken care of and how to configure an NGINX reverse proxy for improved security and scalability.
By the end of the book, the reader should have a solid understanding of all the steps and components involved in the Odoo application development cycle, from the drawing board to the production, deployment, and maintenance of these applications.
