Chapter 13: Interact With Other Modules¶
In the previous chapter, we used inheritance to modify the behavior of a module. In our real estate scenario, we would like to go a step further and be able to generate invoices for our customers. Odoo provides an Invoicing module, so it would be neat to create an invoice directly from our real estate module, i.e. once a property is set to ‘Sold’, an invoice is created in the Invoicing application.
Concrete Example: Account Move¶
Note
Goal: at the end of this section:
A new module
estate_account
should be createdWhen a property is sold, an invoice should be issued for the buyer
![Invoice creation](https://www.odoo.com/documentation/17.0/_images/create_inv.gif)
Any time we interact with another module, we need to keep in mind the modularity. If we intend to sell our application to real estate agencies, some may want the invoicing feature but others may not want it.
Link Module¶
The common approach for such use cases is to create a ‘link’ module. In our case, the module
would depend on estate
and account
and would include the invoice creation logic
of the estate property. This way the real estate and the accounting modules can be installed
independently. When both are installed, the link module provides the new feature.
Exercise
Create a link module.
Create the estate_account
module, which depends on the estate
and account
modules.
For now, it will be an empty shell.
Tip: you already did this at the beginning of the tutorial. The process is very similar.
When the estate_account
module appears in the list, go ahead and install it! You’ll notice that
the Invoicing application is installed as well. This is expected since your module depends on it.
If you uninstall the Invoicing application, your module will be uninstalled as well.
Invoice Creation¶
It’s now time to generate the invoice. We want to add functionality to the
estate.property
model, i.e. we want to add some extra logic for when a property is sold.
Does that sound familiar? If not, it’s a good idea to go back to the
previous chapter since you might have missed
something ;-)
As a first step, we need to extend the action called when pressing the
‘Sold’ button on a property. To do so, we need to
create a model inheritance in the estate_account
module for the estate.property
model. For now, the overridden action will simply return the
super
call. Maybe an example will make things clearer:
from odoo import models
class InheritedModel(models.Model):
_inherit = "inherited.model"
def inherited_action(self):
return super().inherited_action()
A practical example can be found here.
Exercise
Add the first step of invoice creation.
Create a
estate_property.py
file in the correct folder of theestate_account
module._inherit
theestate.property
model.Override the
action_sold
method (you might have named it differently) to return thesuper
call.
Tip: to make sure it works, add a print
or a debugger breakpoint in the overridden method.
Is it working? If not, maybe check that all Python files are correctly imported.
If the override is working, we can move forward and create the invoice. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know how to create any given object in Odoo. Most of the time, it is necessary to have a look at its model to find the required fields and provide appropriate values.
A good way to learn is to look at how other modules already do what you want to do. For example, one of the basic flows of Sales is the creation of an invoice from a sales order. This looks like a good starting point since it does exactly what we want to do. Take some time to read and understand the _create_invoices method. When you are done crying because this simple task looks awfully complex, we can move forward in the tutorial.
To create an invoice, we need the following information:
a
partner_id
: the customera
move_type
: it has several possible valuesa
journal_id
: the accounting journal
This is enough to create an empty invoice.
Exercise
Add the second step of invoice creation.
Create an empty account.move
in the override of the action_sold
method:
the
partner_id
is taken from the currentestate.property
the
move_type
should correspond to a ‘Customer Invoice’
Tips:
to create an object, use
self.env[model_name].create(values)
, wherevalues
is adict
.the
create
method doesn’t accept recordsets as field values.
When a property is set to ‘Sold’, you should now have a new customer invoice created in Invoicing / Customers / Invoices.
Obviously we don’t have any invoice lines so far. To create an invoice line, we need the following information:
name
: a description of the linequantity
price_unit
Moreover, an invoice line needs to be linked to an invoice. The easiest and most efficient way
to link a line to an invoice is to include all lines at invoice creation. To do this, the
invoice_line_ids
field is included in the account.move
creation, which is a
One2many
. One2many and Many2many use special ‘commands’ which have been
made human readable with the Command
namespace. This namespace represents
a triplet command to execute on a set of records. The triplet was originally the only option to
do these commands, but it is now standard to use the namespace instead. The format is to place
them in a list which is executed sequentially. Here is a simple example to include a One2many
field line_ids
at creation of a test_model
:
from odoo import Command
def inherited_action(self):
self.env["test_model"].create(
{
"name": "Test",
"line_ids": [
Command.create({
"field_1": "value_1",
"field_2": "value_2",
})
],
}
)
return super().inherited_action()
Exercise
Add the third step of invoice creation.
Add two invoice lines during the creation of the account.move
. Each property sold will
be invoiced following these conditions:
6% of the selling price
an additional 100.00 from administrative fees
Tip: Add the invoice_line_ids
at creation following the example above.
For each line, we need a name
, quantity
and price_unit
.
This chapter might be one of the most difficult that has been covered so far, but it is the closest to what Odoo development will be in practice. In the next chapter, we will introduce the templating mechanism used in Odoo.