How to Handle CSV File Operations in Odoo

Technical Odoo 12

In odoo, we need to generate multiple types of files for different purposes. In the case of manual integration or something like similar operations, various systems depend on CSV or XML files, because we can easily get the data from those files. For example, in CSV files data are arranged in a specific manner. We are able to separate data with a comma, colon, semi-colon, and so on. and the next line is considered to the next row.

Odoo deals with integrating multiple systems. And sometimes we use manual integration with exporting and importing of different files that contain records from the database. In such cases, we usually depend on CSV files. CSV files are easy to handle to get data into a table format. For example, consider the following table:

File Format	Extension
CSV	.csv
XML	.xml
Python	.py

We can rewrite this table into the CSV format as below:

‘File Format’,‘Extension

‘CSV’,’.csv’

‘XML’,’.xml’

‘Python’,’.py’

Here we are going to use the python ‘CSV’ package to perform CSV file operations. It is very easy to handle write and read operations. Let’s see how to use CSV in odoo. Here I’m using Odoo 12. And it’s based on Python 3. So not much changes in Odoo 13.

Import package:

import csv

Let's see how to write record data into a CSV file.

Consider an example of we are exporting records of products.

First, we need to create a CSV file. In the following example, export.csv is the file name. While writing a file mode must be ‘w’.

with open('export.csv', mode='w') as file:

Then we have to use the writer function for writing data into this file and iterate the records over the lines, for that we can use the writer row() function.

writer = csv.writer(file, delimiter=',', quotechar='"', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
# create a row contains heading of each column
writer.writerow(
     [‘Product Name’, ‘UOM’, ‘Price’, ‘Amount’])
# fetch products and write respective data.
for product in self.env[‘product.product’]:
  name = product.product_tmpl_id.name
  uom = product.product_tmpl_id.uom_id.name
  price = product.product_tmpl_id.list_price
  amount = product.product_tmpl_id.taxes_id.amount
  writer.writerow(
     [name, uom, price, amount,]

delimiter: which defines the separator.

quotechar: which defines the data enclosed with.

quoting: it has some values,

csv.QUOTE_ALL - Quote everything, regardless of type.

csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL - Quote fields with special characters.

csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC - Quote all fields that aren't numbers value.

csv.QUOTE_NONE – Don't quote anything in the output.

In the above snippet, we write the header part to the ‘file’ and iterate through each record in ‘product.product’. Take the needed element from the records and write that into the file.

Then you can read the file in the same function:

with open('export.csv', 'r', encoding="utf-8") as f2:
   # file encode and store in a variable ‘data’
   data = str.encode(f2.read(), 'utf-8')

Then return the data into a wizard and you can export the file through the wizard.

class ExportWizard(models.TransientModel):
   _name = 'wiazrd.export.csv'
   csv_data = fields.Binary()
   filename = fields.Char()
   # function will trigger from the export button in customer export
   @api.multi
   def export_customers(self):
       # call the function generate csv files
       data = self.env['export.csv'].export_product()  
       self.csv_data = base64.encodestring(data)
       self.filename = 'export.csv'
       return {
           'type': 'ir.actions.act_url',
           'url': "web/content/?model=wizard.export.csv&id=" + str(self.id) +
                  "&filename=export.csv&field=csv_data&download=true&filename=" + self.filename,
           'target': 'self',
       }