Defining the Model representation and order

Models have structural attributes defining their behavior. These are prefixed with an underscore and the most important is _name, which defines the internal global identifier for the Model.

There are two other attributes we can use. One to set the field used as a representation, or title, for the records, and another one to set the order they are presented in.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes that you have an instance ready with my_module, as described in Chapter 3, Creating Odoo Modules.

How to do it…

The my_module instance should already contain a Python file called models/library_book.py, which defines a basic model. We will edit it to add a new class-level attribute after _name:

1. To add a human-friendly title to the model, add the following:

       _description = 'Library Book'

2. To have records sorted first by default from newer to older and then by title, add the following:

       _order = 'date_release desc, name'

3. To use the short_name field as the record...