Creating new records

A frequent need when writing business logic methods is to create new records. This recipe explains how to create records of the res.partner model, which is defined in Odoo's base addon module. We will create a new partner representing a company, with some contacts.

Getting ready

You need to know the structure of the models for which you want to create a record, especially their names and types as well as any constraints existing on these fields (for example, whether some of them are mandatory). The res.partner model defined in Odoo has a very large number of fields, and to keep things simple, we will only use a few of these. Moreover, the model definition in Odoo uses the old API. To help you follow the recipe, here is a port of the model definition we will be using for the new API:

class ResPartner(models.Model):
    _name = 'res.partner'
    name = fields.Char('Name', required=True)
    email = fields.Char('Email')
    date = fields.Date('Date')
    is_company = fields.Boolean('Is a company')
    parent_id = fields.Many2one('res.partner', 'Related Company')
    child_ids = fields.One2many('res.partner', 'parent_id',
                                'Contacts')

How to do it…

In order to create a partner with some contacts, you need to take the following steps:

  1. Inside the method that needs to create a new partner, get the current date formatted as a string expected by create():
        today_str = fields.Date.context_today()
  2. Prepare a dictionary of values for the fields of the first contact:
        val1 = {'name': u'Eric Idle',
            'email': u'[email protected]'
            'date': today_str}
  3. Prepare a dictionary of values for the fields of the second contact:
        val2 = {'name': u'John Cleese',
            'email': u'[email protected]',
            'date': today_str}
  4. Prepare a dictionary of values for the fields of the company:
        partner_val = {
        'name': u'Flying Circus',
        'email': u'[email protected]',
        'date': today_str,
        'is_company': True,
        'child_ids': [(0, 0, val1),
                      (0, 0, val2),
                      ]
    }
  5. Call the create() method to create the new records:
    record = self.env['res.partner'].create(partner_val)

How it works…

To create a new record for a model, we can call the create(values) method on any recordset related to the model. This method returns a new recordset of length 1 containing the new record, with fields values specified in the values dictionary.

In the dictionary:

  • Text field values are given with Python strings (preferably Unicode strings).
  • Float and Integer field values are given using Python floats or integers.
  • Boolean field values are given, preferably using Python booleans or integer.
  • Date (resp. Datetime) field values are given as Python strings. Use fields.Date.to_string() (resp. fields.Datetime.to_string()) to convert a Python datetime.date (resp. datetime.datetime) object to the expected format.
  • Binary field values are passed as a Base64 encoded string. The base64 module from the Python standard library provides methods such as encodestring(s) to encode a string in Base64.
  • Many2one field values are given with an integer, which has to be the database ID of the related record.
  • One2many and Many2many fields use a special syntax. The value is a list containing tuples of three elements, as follows:

    Tuple

    Effect

    (0, 0, dict_val)

    Create a new record that will be related to the main record

    (6, 0, id_list)

    Create a relation between the record being created and existing records, whose IDs are in the Python list id_list

    Caution: When used on a One2many, this will remove the records from any previous relation

In the recipe, we create the dictionaries for two contacts in the company we want to create, and then we use these dictionaries in the child_ids entry of the dictionary for the company being created, using the (0, 0, dict_val) syntax explained previously.

When create() is called in step 5, three records are created:

  • One for the main partner company, which is returned by create
  • One for each of the two contacts, which are available in record.child_ids

There's more

If the model defined some default values for some fields, nothing special needs to be done; create() will take care of computing the default values for the fields not present in the supplied dictionary.

On the other hand, onchange methods are not called by create(), because they are called by the web client during the initial edition of the record. Some of these methods compute default values for fields related to a given field. When creating records by hand you have to do the work yourself, either by providing explicit values or by calling the onchange methods. The Calling onchange methods on the server side recipe in Chapter 6, Advanced Server Side Development Techniques explains how to do this.

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