OpenERP Web Core and standard addons

• General organization and core ideas (design philosophies)
• Internal documentation, autodoc, Python and JS domains
• QWeb code documentation/description
• Documentation of the OpenERP APIs and choices taken based on that?
• Style guide and coding conventions (PEP8? More)
• Test frameworks in JS?

Standard Views

Search View

The OpenERP search view really is a sub-view, used in support of views acting on collections of records (list view or graph view, for instance).

Its main goal is to collect information from its widgets (themselves collecting information from the users) and make those available to the rest of the client.

The search view’s root is SearchView(). This object should never need to be created or managed directly, its lifecycle should be driven by the ViewManager().

The search view defines a number of internal and external protocols to communicate with the objects around and within it. Most of these protocols are informal, and types available for inheritance are more mixins than mandatory.

Events

on_loaded

Fires when the search view receives its view data (the result of fields_view_get). Hooking up before the event allows for altering view data before it can be used.

By the time on_loaded is done, the search view is guaranteed to be fully set up and ready to use.

on_search

Event triggered after a user asked for a search. The search view fires this event after collecting all input data (contexts, domains and group_by contexts). Note that the search view does not merge those (or otherwise evaluate them), they are returned as provided by the various inputs within the view.

on_clear

Triggered after a user asked for a form clearing.

Input management

An important concept in the search view is that of input. It is both an informal protocol and an abstract type that can be inherited from.

Inputs are widgets which can contain user data (a char widget for instance, or a selection box). They are capable of action and of reaction:

registration

This is an input action. Inputs have to register themselves to the main view (which they receive as a constructor argument). This is performed by pushing themselves on the openerp.base.SearchView.inputs array.

get_context

An input reaction. When it needs to collect contexts, the view calls get_context() on all its inputs.

Inputs can react in the following manners:

• Return a context (an object), this is the “normal” response if the input holds a value.

• Return a value that evaluates as false (generally null). This value indicates the input does not contain any value and will not affect the results of the search.

• Raise openerp.base.search.Invalid() to indicate that it holds a value but this value can not be used in the search (because it is incorrectly formatted or nonsensical). Raising Invalid() is guaranteed to cancel the search process.

  Invalid() takes three mandatory arguments: an identifier (a name for instance), the invalid value, and a validation message indicating the issue.

get_domain

The second input reaction, the possible behaviors of inputs are the same as for get_context.

The openerp.base.search.Input() type implements registration on its own, but its implementations of get_context and get_domain simply raise errors and must be overridden.

One last action is for filters, as an activation order has to be kept on them for some controls (to establish the correct grouping sequence, for instance).

To that end, filters can call openerp.base.Search.do_toggle_filter(), providing themselves as first argument.

Filters calling do_toggle_filter() also need to implement a method called is_enabled(), which the search view will use to know the current status of the filter.

The search view automatically triggers a search after calls to do_toggle_filter().

Life cycle

The search view has a pretty simple and linear life cycle, in three main steps:

init()

Nothing interesting happens here

start()

Called by the main view’s creator, this is the main initialization step for the list view.

It begins with a remote call to fetch the view’s descriptors (fields_view_get).

Once the remote call is complete, the on_loaded even happens, holding three main operations:

make_widgets()

Builds and returns the top-level widgets of the search view. Because it returns an array of widget lines (a 2-dimensional matrix of widgets) it should be called recursively by container widgets (openerp.base.search.Group() for instance).

render()

Called by the search view on all top-level widgets. Container widgets should recursively call this method on their own children widgets.

Widgets are provided with a mapping of {name: value} holding default values for the search view. They can freely pick their initial values from there, but must pass the mapping to their children widgets if they have any.

start()

The last operation of the search view startup is to initialize all its widgets in order. This is again done recursively (the search view starts its children, which have to start their own children).

stop()

Used before discarding a search view, allows the search view to disable its events and pass the message to its own widgets, gracefully shutting down the whole view.

Widgets

In a search view, the widget is simply a unit of display.

All widgets must be able to react to three events, which will be called in this order:

render()

Called with a map of default values. The widget must return a String, which is its HTML representation. That string can be empty (if the widget should not be represented).

Widgets are responsible for asking their children for rendering, and for passing along the default values.

start()

Called without arguments. At this point, the widget has been fully rendered and can set its events up, if any.

The widget is responsible for starting its children, if it has any.

stop()

Gives the widget the opportunity to unbind its events, remove itself from the DOM and perform any other cleanup task it may have.

Even if the widget does not do anything itself, it is responsible for shutting down its children.

An abstract type is available and can be inherited from, to simplify the implementation of those tasks:

Inputs

The search namespace (openerp.base.search) provides two more abstract types, used to implement input widgets:

• openerp.base.search.Input() is the most basic input type, it only implements input registration.

  If inherited from, descendant classes should not call its implementations of get_context() and get_domain().

• openerp.base.search.Field() is used to implement more “field” widgets (which allow the user to input potentially complex values).

  It provides various services for its subclasses:

  • Sets up the field attributes, using attributes from the field and the view node.

  • It fills the widget with Filter() if the field has any child filter.

  • It automatically generates an identifier based on the field type and the field name, using make_id().

  • It sets up a basic (overridable) template attribute, combined with the previous tasks, this makes subclasses of Field() render themselves “for free”.

  • It provides basic implementations of get_context and get_domain, both hinging on the subclasses implementing get_value() (which should return a correct, converted Javascript value):

    get_context()

    Checks if the field has a non-null and non-empty (String) value, and that the field has a context attr.

    If both conditions are fullfilled, returns the context.

    get_domain()

    Only requires that the field has a non-null and non-empty value.

    If the field has a filter_domain, returns it immediately. Otherwise, builds a context using the field’s name, the field operator and the field value, and returns it.

List View

OpenERP Web’s list views don’t actually exist as such in OpenERP itself: a list view is an OpenERP tree view in the view_mode form.

The overall purpose of a list view is to display collections of objects in two main forms: per-object, where each object is a row in and of itself, and grouped, where multiple objects are represented with a single row providing an aggregated view of all grouped objects.

These two forms can be mixed within a single list view, if needed.

The root of a list view is openerp.base.ListView(), which may need to be overridden (partially or fully) to control list behavior in non-view cases (when using a list view as sub-component of a form widget for instance).

Creation and Initialization

As with most OpenERP Web views, the list view’s init() takes quite a number of arguments.

While most of them are the standard view constructor arguments (view_manager, session, element_id, dataset and an optional view_id), the list view adds a number of options for basic customization (without having to override methods or templates):

selectable (default: true)

Indicates that the list view should allow records to be selected individually. Displays selection check boxes to the left of all record rows, and allows for the triggering of the selection event.

deletable (default: true)

Indicates that the list view should allow records to be removed individually. Displays a deletion button to the right of all record rows, and allows for the triggering of the deletion event.

header (default: true)

Indicates that list columns should bear a header sporting their name (for non-action columns).

addable (default: "New")

Indicates that a record addition/creation button should be displayed in the list’s header, along with its label. Also allows for the triggering of the record addition event.

sortable (default: true)

Indicates that the list view can be sorted per-column (by clicking on its column headers).

reorderable (default: true)

Indicates that the list view records can be reordered (and re-sequenced) by drag and drop.

Events

Addition

The addition event is used to add a record to an existing list view. The default behavior is to switch to the form view, on a new record.

Addition behavior can be overridden by replacing the do_add_record() method.

Selection

The selection event is triggered when a given record is selected in the list view.

It can be overridden by replacing the do_select() method.

The default behavior is simply to hide or display the list-wise deletion button depending on whether there are selected records or not.

Deletion

The deletion event is triggered when the user tries to remove 1..n records from the list view, either individually or globally (via the header button).

Deletion can be overridden by replacing the do_delete() method. By default, this method calls unlink() in order to remove the records entirely.

Note

the list-wise deletion button (next to the record addition button) simply proxies to do_delete() after obtaining all selected record ids, but it is possible to override it alone by replacing do_delete_selected().

Internal API Doc

Python

These classes should be moved to other sections of the doc as needed, probably.

Testing

Python

Testing for the OpenERP Web core is similar to testing addons: the tests live in openerpweb.tests, unittest2 is the testing framework and tests can be run via either unittest2 (unit2 discover) or via nose (nosetests).

Tests for the OpenERP Web core can also be run using setup.py test.