Best practices#

OpenSPP follows the coding standards of the Odoo Community Association (OCA), which are designed to ensure high-quality, maintainable, and consistent code. While the full guidelines are extensive, here are some of the most important best practices to follow:

Enforce Coding Standards with Pre-Commit#

  • OpenSPP uses pre-commit to automatically enforce PEP8 and other coding standards. This is the recommended way to ensure your code is compliant before committing.

  • The configuration runs tools like black (formatting), isort (import sorting), and flake8 (linting).

  • To set it up, run these commands once in your repository:

    pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

  • After setup, these checks will run automatically on every git commit. If an issue is found, the commit will be stopped, and some tools may automatically fix the files for you.

Write Clean and Readable XML#

  • Use a consistent naming convention for record IDs. For example: view_model_name_form, action_model_name_window.

  • Logically order fields in views to create an intuitive user experience.

Prioritize Security and Extensibility#

  • Always define access rights in security/ir.model.access.csv. Never grant universal access (group_id:id,"",...) without a strong reason.

  • Avoid using raw SQL queries. Use the Odoo ORM to ensure security rules are respected.

  • Always use _inherit and xpath to extend existing functionality. Never modify core OpenSPP or Odoo files directly.

Adhere to Licensing Requirements#

  • All custom modules for OpenSPP must be licensed under LGPL-3.

  • Ensure that any third-party Python libraries or other dependencies you add are compatible with the LGPL-3 license.