RESTful OpenERP

This repository is not maintained and has not been updated for a long time. Feel free to use it for inspiration or build your own solution on top of it, but this code should not be used as-is.

Introduction

OpenERP is a powerful Open Source Software for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). It has a GTK desktop client and a web interface, both talking to the OpenERP backend via XML-RPC. This also allows to write third-party applications that use OpenERP functionality – however, not in a RESTful way.

The aim of this project is to provide a RESTful “proxy” for OpenERP's XML-RPC web service. We aim to build the API in such a way that

it becomes a lot easier for third party applications to talk to OpenERP (by making the API easily understandable and providing hyperlinks to linked resources and workflows) and
to allow to make OpenERP the primary data source for services (by making results cacheable as much as possible).

Status

Currently it is possible to get

for all object types defined within OpenERP (e.g., res.partner), a list of all objects of this type at /{database}/{model} as an Atom feed,
a filtered version of that list using /{database}/{model}?{key}={value},
for all object types defined within OpenERP, a complete description of each object at the URI specified in the above feed (usually /{database}/{model}/{id}) as an Atom entry,
a parameterized version of that description for general environment parameters such as “lang” or “tz” or special context-dependent parameters such as “product_id” using /{database}/{model}/{id}?{key}={value},
for all object types defined within OpenERP, a description of the schema of this object type at /{database}/{model}/schema as a Relax NG XML description,
for all object types defined within OpenERP, the default values for this object type at /{database}/{model}/defaults.

Also, it is possible to create, for all object types defined within OpenERP (e.g., res.partner), a new object of this type by POSTing an appropriate description to /{database}/{model}. Such a description can in particular be obtained by taking the XML from /{database}/{model}/defaults, extracting the OpenERP-specific fragment (e.g., the res_partner node) and setting the body of all required elements.

Access control is done via HTTP Basic Auth using OpenERP as backend. There is a good test coverage of HTTP response codes, XML validity etc.

To illustrate:

List of all objects

curl -u user:pass http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product gives:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title type="text">product.product items</title>
  <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product</id>
  <updated>2012-07-04T12:56:07Z</updated>
  <generator>PyAtom</generator>
  <entry>
    <title type="text">MESH (german)</title>
    <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147</id>
    <updated>2012-05-31T13:25:06Z</updated>
    <link href="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147" />
    <author>
      <name>None</name>
    </author>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title type="text">Is God a Number?</title>
    <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/179</id>
    <updated>2012-06-13T08:05:54Z</updated>
    <link href="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/179" />
    <author>
      <name>None</name>
    </author>
  </entry>
  ...
</feed>

curl -u user:pass http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product?default_code=01-2037-01 gives:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title type="text">product.product items</title>
  <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product</id>
  <updated>2012-05-31T13:25:06Z</updated>
  <generator>PyAtom</generator>
  <entry>
    <title type="text">MESH (german)</title>
    <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147</id>
    <updated>2012-05-31T13:25:06Z</updated>
    <link href="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147" />
    <author>
      <name>None</name>
    </author>
  </entry>
</feed>

Single object description

curl -u user:pass http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147 gives:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title type="text">MESH (german)</title>
  <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147</id>
  <updated>2012-05-31T13:25:06Z</updated>
  <link href="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147" rel="self" />
  <author>
    <name>None</name>
  </author>
  <content type="application/vnd.openerp+xml">
  <product_product xmlns="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/schema">
    <ean13 type='char'>9783540853305</ean13>
    <code type='char'>01-2037-01</code>
    <incoming_qty type='float'><!-- 0.0 --></incoming_qty>
    <name_template type='char'><!-- False --></name_template>
    <company_id type='many2one'>
      <link href='http://localhost:8068/erptest/res.company/1' />
    </company_id>
    ...
  </product_product>
  </content>
</entry>

curl -u user:pass http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147?lang=de_DE gives (note the translated title):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title type="text">MESH (deutsch)</title>
  <id>http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147</id>
  <updated>2012-05-31T13:25:06Z</updated>
  <link href="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/147" rel="self" />
  <author>
    <name>None</name>
  </author>
  <content type="application/vnd.openerp+xml">
  <product_product xmlns="http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/schema">
    <ean13 type='char'>9783540853305</ean13>
    <code type='char'>01-2037-01</code>
    <incoming_qty type='float'><!-- 0.0 --></incoming_qty>
    <name_template type='char'><!-- False --></name_template>
    <company_id type='many2one'>
      <link href='http://localhost:8068/erptest/res.company/1' />
    </company_id>
    ...
  </product_product>
  </content>
</entry>

Schema

curl -u user:pass http://localhost:8068/erptest/product.product/schema gives:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<element name="res_partner" xmlns="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0" datatypeLibrary="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-datatypes" ns="http://localhost:8068/erptest/res.partner/schema">
<interleave>
  <element name="id"><data type="decimal" /></element>
  <element name="ean13">
    <attribute name="type" />
    <optional><text /></optional>
  </element>
  <element name="code">
    <attribute name="type" />
    <optional><text /></optional>
  </element>
  <element name="incoming_qty">
    <attribute name="type" />
    <optional><data type="double" /></optional>
  </element>
  ...
</interleave>
</element>

Roadmap

See issues.

Dependencies

Twisted >= 10.1
PyAtom
python-dateutil
lxml
pyOpenSSL (optional, needed to access OpenERP via https)

There is a requirements.txt file for pip that can be used to satisfy the required dependencies.

Installation

To install restful-openerp in a Python virtualenv, do as follows:

git clone git://github.com/tgpfeiffer/restful-openerp.git
cd restful-openerp/
virtualenv --no-site-packages .env
. .env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt (note that you will have to have libxslt1-dev and libxml2-dev installed to build lxml)
cp restful-openerp.cfg.default restful-openerp.cfg and edit restful-openerp.cfg to contain the proper URL of your OpenERP XML-RPC endpoint (default: a locally running instance). If you want to run the unit tests, also give a valid username/password for your OpenERP instance in there.
trial basicTests should now run a list of unit tests (that hopefully all pass)
python restfulOpenErpProxy.py runs the actual server process

License

AGPLv3 for now. Will maybe change later.

tgpfeiffer / restful-openerp

readme