OpenERP - How to get sequence number when creating new Sales Order via XMLRPC

Question

I'm making an Android app for OpenERP and I'm trying to create new Sales Order. One of the required fields however is Order Reference, which is normaly generated from the sequence.

Is there some way to get this sequence via xmlrpc?

Or do I have to make my own sequence in the app? ...but then how can I make sure that it would not colide with order references generated via web client?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You should not need to do anything special: just call sale.order's create method with the content of your Sales Order. As you noticed when you create a Sales Order using the web interface, the reference field is automatically filled in with a proper sequence number.

This happens because sale.order has a default value for the reference field (the sale.order's name field, technically). Default values work as follows:

• they are fetched by the client UI to pre-populate the creation form. The client obtains these value by calling default_get on the corresponding model (which will take the values from the _defaults dictionary.
• when the create method is called to create a new record, the system will call default_get again in order to complete the values for all the fields that have defaults and were not explicitly passed to create

As a result, you don't need to do anything: just call create without giving a value for the name field, and the system will automatically set its value to a valid sequence number, just as it would in the UI. Alternatively if you'd like to pre-process the default values or to exactly mimic what the UI does, then you should call default_get yourself via XML-RPC and use the returned values to prepare the parameters you will pass to create.

Version note: you did not mention any specific OpenERP version, and the actual behavior may vary a little bit depending on the version. In OpenERP 6.1 the sale.order model did exactly what I described above, as you can see in the source. In OpenERP 7.0 however the logic was slightly modified to avoid consuming sequence numbers that might never be used (if the user cancels before saving): instead of generating a new number in default_get, the name field is initialized to '/' by default, and the create method replaces it with a new number, as you can see in the source. The net effect is the same.