RPC Calls

Building static displays is all nice and good and allows for neat effects (and sometimes you’re given data to display from third parties so you don’t have to make any effort), but a point generally comes where you’ll want to talk to the world and make some network requests.

OpenERP Web provides two primary APIs to handle this, a low-level JSON-RPC based API communicating with the Python section of OpenERP Web (and of your addon, if you have a Python part) and a high-level API above that allowing your code to talk directly to the OpenERP server, using familiar-looking calls.

All networking APIs are asynchronous. As a result, all of them will return Deferred() objects (whether they resolve those with values or not). Understanding how those work before before moving on is probably necessary.

High-level API: calling into OpenERP models

Access to OpenERP object methods (made available through XML-RPC from the server) is done via the openerp.web.Model() class. This class maps onto the OpenERP server objects via two primary methods, call() and query().

call() is a direct mapping to the corresponding method of the OpenERP server object. Its usage is similar to that of the OpenERP Model API, with three differences:

  • The interface is asynchronous, so instead of returning results directly RPC method calls will return Deferred() instances, which will themselves resolve to the result of the matching RPC call.
  • Because ECMAScript 3/Javascript 1.5 doesnt feature any equivalent to __getattr__ or method_missing, there needs to be an explicit method to dispatch RPC methods.
  • No notion of pooler, the model proxy is instantiated where needed, not fetched from an other (somewhat global) object
var Users = new Model('res.users');

Users.call('change_password', ['oldpassword', 'newpassword'],
                  {context: some_context}).then(function (result) {
    // do something with change_password result
});

query() is a shortcut for a builder-style interface to searches (search + read in OpenERP RPC terms). It returns a Query() object which is immutable but allows building new Query() instances from the first one, adding new properties or modifiying the parent object’s:

Users.query(['name', 'login', 'user_email', 'signature'])
     .filter([['active', '=', true], ['company_id', '=', main_company]])
     .limit(15)
     .all().then(function (users) {
    // do work with users records
});

The query is only actually performed when calling one of the query serialization methods, all() and first(). These methods will perform a new RPC call every time they are called.

For that reason, it’s actually possible to keep “intermediate” queries around and use them differently/add new specifications on them.

class openerp.web.Model(name)
openerp.web.Model.name

name of the OpenERP model this object is bound to

openerp.web.Model.call(method[, args][, kwargs])

Calls the method method of the current model, with the provided positional and keyword arguments.

Arguments:
  • method (String) – method to call over rpc on the name
  • args (Array<>) – positional arguments to pass to the method, optional
  • kwargs (Object<>) – keyword arguments to pass to the method, optional
Return type:

Deferred<>

openerp.web.Model.query(fields)
Arguments:
  • fields (Array<String>) – list of fields to fetch during the search
Returns:

a Query() object representing the search to perform

class openerp.web.Query(fields)

The first set of methods is the “fetching” methods. They perform RPC queries using the internal data of the object they’re called on.

openerp.web.Query.all()

Fetches the result of the current Query() object’s search.

Return type:Deferred<Array<>>
openerp.web.Query.first()

Fetches the first result of the current Query(), or null if the current Query() does have any result.

Return type:Deferred<Object | null>
openerp.web.Query.count()

Fetches the number of records the current Query() would retrieve.

Return type:Deferred<Number>
openerp.web.Query.group_by(grouping...)

Fetches the groups for the query, using the first specified grouping parameter

Arguments:
  • grouping (Array<String>) – Lists the levels of grouping asked of the server. Grouping can actually be an array or varargs.
Return type:

Deferred<Array<openerp.web.QueryGroup>> | null

The second set of methods is the “mutator” methods, they create a new Query() object with the relevant (internal) attribute either augmented or replaced.

openerp.web.Query.context(ctx)

Adds the provided ctx to the query, on top of any existing context

openerp.web.Query.filter(domain)

Adds the provided domain to the query, this domain is AND-ed to the existing query domain.

opeenrp.web.Query.offset(offset)

Sets the provided offset on the query. The new offset replaces the old one.

openerp.web.Query.limit(limit)

Sets the provided limit on the query. The new limit replaces the old one.

openerp.web.Query.order_by(fields…)

Overrides the model’s natural order with the provided field specifications. Behaves much like Django’s QuerySet.order_by:

  • Takes 1..n field names, in order of most to least importance (the first field is the first sorting key). Fields are provided as strings.
  • A field specifies an ascending order, unless it is prefixed with the minus sign “-” in which case the field is used in the descending order

Divergences from Django’s sorting include a lack of random sort (? field) and the inability to “drill down” into relations for sorting.

Aggregation (grouping)

OpenERP has powerful grouping capacities, but they are kind-of strange in that they’re recursive, and level n+1 relies on data provided directly by the grouping at level n. As a result, while read_group works it’s not a very intuitive API.

OpenERP Web 7.0 eschews direct calls to read_group in favor of calling a method of Query(), much in the way it is one in SQLAlchemy [1]:

some_query.group_by(['field1', 'field2']).then(function (groups) {
    // do things with the fetched groups
});

This method is asynchronous when provided with 1..n fields (to group on) as argument, but it can also be called without any field (empty fields collection or nothing at all). In this case, instead of returning a Deferred object it will return null.

When grouping criterion come from a third-party and may or may not list fields (e.g. could be an empty list), this provides two ways to test the presence of actual subgroups (versus the need to perform a regular query for records):

  • A check on group_by‘s result and two completely separate code paths

    var groups;
    if (groups = some_query.group_by(gby)) {
        groups.then(function (gs) {
            // groups
        });
    }
    // no groups
    
  • Or a more coherent code path using when()‘s ability to coerce values into deferreds:

    $.when(some_query.group_by(gby)).then(function (groups) {
        if (!groups) {
            // No grouping
        } else {
            // grouping, even if there are no groups (groups
            // itself could be an empty array)
        }
    });
    

The result of a (successful) group_by() is an array of QueryGroup().

Low-level API: RPC calls to Python side

While the previous section is great for calling core OpenERP code (models code), it does not work if you want to call the Python side of OpenERP Web.

For this, a lower-level API exists on on Connection() objects (usually available through openerp.connection): the rpc method.

This method simply takes an absolute path (which is the combination of the Python controller’s _cp_path attribute and the name of the method you want to call) and a mapping of attributes to values (applied as keyword arguments on the Python method [2]). This function fetches the return value of the Python methods, converted to JSON.

For instance, to call the resequence of the DataSet controller:

openerp.connection.rpc('/web/dataset/resequence', {
    model: some_model,
    ids: array_of_ids,
    offset: 42
}).then(function (result) {
    // resequenced on server
});
[1]with a small twist: SQLAlchemy’s orm.query.Query.group_by is not terminal, it returns a query which can still be altered.
[2]except for context, which is extracted and stored in the request object itself.

Table Of Contents

Related Topics

This Page