Odoo Customization made Simple with Odoo Studio

Odoo has built this awesome portal known as Odoo Studio, with the help of which anybody can easily and quickly build custom Odoo Applications within a short span of time. No development skills or knowledge is required to operate Odoo Studio. Need bespoke Odoo customization? Odoo studio is the portal for you.

What does Odoo Studio do?

• It allows you to do Odoo customization without Python programming. Moreover, you can develop your own models, actions, views as well as menus with this.
• It is the most beneficial thing that Odoo Studio offers, as it provides you the ability to write your actions in the Python. Add in a full XML editor as well as custom views.
• When it comes to designing an application in Odoo your core consideration point would be data models. With this app, you can create models by using an eco-friendly web interface without adding code. Even if you are an expert developer, typing code takes a lot of time. By using Odoo Studio, you can get your models up quickly as well as get to work on the difficult parts of the application.
• Create basic lists, views, and forms without using XML with the Web Designing Tool.
• You can create custom views as well as modify existing views in Odoo without using XML code. While the editors are limited, you can prototype application rapidly as well as run it without XML code.
• When a user does Odoo customization, the XML is stored in files which are loaded into Odoo database. This built-in feature allows you to easily customize views in with same flexibility you would have a standard Odoo application. You can utilize Odoo Studio’s for building an application as well as will also have the ability to create the same strong views in XML.
• Odoo Studio gives you complete ability to tie into the custom Python methods. It allows you to develop powerful business applications in Odoo within the Odoo Studio.
• One of the major benefits of Odoo Studio is that you can easily export your custom application into a plain zip file. Then you can easily import the custom application into other Odoo instance. Unlike any other developer tool that modifies models, actions and views of Odoo instance; the Odoo Studio develop new views as well as modifications within their custom application structure.

With Odoo Studio, You become the Developer.

• You can design beautiful and full featured apps in minutes, not weeks.
• Build great reports with our awesome report builder.
• More than just forms, customize graphs, kanban, pivot tables, gantt charts, matrix, etc.
• Add business logic to your application, automate tasks with no development.
• Boost your app with an email gateway, the report engine, BI, workflows, etc.
• Your apps will automatically have a responsive, mobile user interface.
• Unlock the developer mode to get access to technical details.
• Design your custom application once, and get a desktop and a mobile app automatically.
• Odoo Studio is built for large companies with millions of records. The generated applications are blazing fast.

Screen Designer

• Create advanced forms with notebooks, inline discussion widgets, integrated statistics, etc.
• Create read-only or read-write lists that look like Excel spreadsheets.
• Create custom pivot tables on the data; drill-down on any dimension and display several measures.
• Use the calendar view to manage documents linked to a schedule.
• Create website forms to allow your visitors to create records directly from your website.
• Design cards that can be dragged & dropped in columns for process-oriented documents.
• Get beautiful statistics on your custom objects with the graph views: pie charts, line charts, bar charts, etc.
• Gantt charts are great for time-related documents like events, meetings, planning, etc.
• The grid view is convenient to massively edit records with a multi-dimensions matrix view.

Features

• Match your custom columns with .CSV or .XLS files to add records or update existing ones.
• Create export templates based on your custom objects to reuse them easily.
• Perform batch actions in a selection of records: delete, automations, etc.
• Reorganize your application menu with drag & drop, and create new menus in just a click.
• Get the email gateway directly connected to your app to create records or to discuss by email easily.
• Customize your search bar and use advanced features like grouping, filtering and access rights.
• Get a web-service API to access all your custom objects easily. No extra code required.
• Make your fields invisible, required or read only under certain conditions.

Reports

• Use predefined report templates to create your own reports easily.
• Reports are automatically printed in the language of the recipient (customer, vendor, etc.)
• Use the XML editor for advanced reporting customizations based on HTML.

Automation

• Automate emails based on actions, time or conditional statements to ease the relationship with your customers.
• Use python code to develop advanced automations. Sky is the limit.
• Automate updates based on conditional statements.
• Example: set the priority field to ‘Urgent’ if no responsible is assigned after 5 days.

Miscellaneous

• Your application and its user content will automatically run in multiple languages.
• Benefit from existing Odoo features to easily build advanced applications in minutes.
• Share your customizations with your friends and colleagues simply by sharing a URL.
• Create ACLs rules or filters to define access rights for larger companies.
• Every Odoo Studio database has a collaborative notepad where you can document your customizations for your team.
• Design your own app icon, make it yours.

Odoo studio is definitely a good feature, but is recommended to use it only in cases where the following conditions are met:

• Small changes are required (adding fields, reports)
• Perfect change log and documentation is made for each change done in Odoo studio
• No other customizations are planned in the future (changes in source code is complicated after using of Odoo studio)

Changes made via Odoo studio are not saved into code itself, but only to the Odoo database.

So, it can cause a lot of problems with future code development where the programmers can ́t see these changes and many errors and strange behavior of the system can happen.

Even if much more complicated changes can be done with Odoo studio, it’s not recommended to use it in production environment. It is a handy tool on testing environment where first design is made (even by non-programmers) and it can be used as a good start for programmers to create this functionality as a code-based Odoo customization for production environment afterwards.

Cons:

• Changes are saved only to database (not visible in the source code)
• It can be difficult to do programmer modifications of Odoo parts already changed in Odoo studio
• It can cause much higher cost price of code customizations in the end
• Unqualified usage of Odoo studio can cause errors and slowing the system

We, at Pragmatic, recommend Odoo studio to those customers who want to edit only some fields and views and don’t plan to do any future updates in the code.

For the rest, Code-based Odoo customization is recommended.