Making Your First Edits

This page walks you through the smallest possible change to HCPI: renaming the Outlets menu in the app launcher. It takes about five minutes, touches one line of XML, and the result is immediately visible in your browser.

The point isn't the change itself — it's the edit → upgrade → refresh loop. Get this loop comfortable and every more interesting change becomes easy.

Before you start

HCPI is installed and you can reach http://localhost:9201 in a browser. If not, finish the installation guide first.
You've read Odoo Basics — you know what a menu, action, and view are.
VS Code (or PyCharm) is open on /opt/hcpi/ with the venv selected.

The change we're making

Right now your app launcher has an Outlets tile (visible on the home screen and in the sidebar). We're going to rename it to Outlets & Markets.

That's it. One word changed. Then we'll iterate — change the empty-state message, reorder a column — to build the muscle memory for bigger changes.

Step 1: Find the file

You already know from Odoo Basics that menus live in XML files. From the Module Reference you know that outlets are owned by hcpi_outlet. So the file you want is somewhere under custom/HCPI/hcpi_outlet/views/.

In VS Code, open custom/HCPI/hcpi_outlet/views/hcpi_outlet_menus.xml. The top of the file looks like this:

<menuitem id="menu_hcpi_outlet_root"
          name="Outlets"
          web_icon="hcpi_outlet,static/description/icon.png"
          sequence="25"
          groups="hcpi_outlet.group_outlet_manager" />

That name="Outlets" is what shows up in the app launcher.

How would you have found this without being told?

Two ways:

In the UI — turn on Developer Mode (top-right user menu → Settings → Activate the developer mode). Then hover the Outlets menu in the sidebar: a tooltip shows the menu's XML ID, hcpi_outlet.menu_hcpi_outlet_root. Grep your project for menu_hcpi_outlet_root and you'll land on this file.
In the IDE — open project-wide search (Ctrl+Shift+F in VS Code), search for name="Outlets" inside custom/HCPI/. Three hits — the root menu, a sub-menu, and an action's name.

Step 2: Make the change

Change line 5 from:

name="Outlets"

to:

name="Outlets &amp; Markets"

(& is XML-speak for & — XML treats raw & as a parse error, which is one of the first papercuts you hit when working with view files.)

Save the file.

Step 3: Apply the change

Editing the file does nothing on its own. Odoo reads menus out of the database — specifically out of ir.ui.menu, as you saw in Odoo Basics. You need to tell Odoo to re-read the XML and overwrite the existing records.

Two ways. Pick one:

Option A: Restart with `-u hcpi_outlet` (works always)

Stop Odoo (Ctrl+C in the terminal where it's running), then start it again with the upgrade flag:

cd /opt/hcpi
source venv/bin/activate
python odoo/odoo-bin -c conf/hcpi.conf -u hcpi_outlet

-u hcpi_outlet tells Odoo: "before serving requests, re-install the hcpi_outlet module — re-load its XML, re-create any tables that have changed, etc." It takes a few seconds.

Wait for the line HTTP service (werkzeug) running on ... port 9201. That's your signal.

Option B: Run with `--dev=xml` (faster for iteration)

If you start Odoo with --dev=xml, it re-reads XML view files on every request without needing a restart:

python odoo/odoo-bin -c conf/hcpi.conf --dev=xml

Now you can edit any XML view and just refresh the browser — no restart needed. Caveat: this only covers XML view re-reading. If you change Python code, you still need to restart. Stick with --dev=xml for the iterations below.

--dev=xml doesn't reload menus reliably

Menus are mostly cached in the user's session. If your menu rename doesn't appear with --dev=xml, hard-refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R) and log out/in. If it still doesn't appear, fall back to Option A — -u hcpi_outlet will definitely apply it.

Step 4: See the change

Open http://localhost:9201 in your browser. Hard-refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R).

You should see Outlets & Markets wherever you saw Outlets before — in the app launcher tile and in the sidebar.

If you don't:

Didn't refresh hard enough. Ctrl+Shift+R (or open DevTools and disable cache).
Used --dev=xml and it didn't pick up. Stop Odoo and restart with -u hcpi_outlet.
Wrong file. You changed menu_hcpi_outlet, not menu_hcpi_outlet_root. There are two menus named "Outlets" in this file — the root (in the app launcher) and a sub-menu (inside the root). Rename the root one to see the change in the app launcher.
XML parse error. Did you escape the & as &? Check the Odoo terminal output for a parse error.

That's the full loop. Edit → upgrade → refresh → verify.

Iteration 2: Change the empty-state message

Now you've done it once, here's a second change in the same module. This time we'll touch an action instead of a menu.

Open custom/HCPI/hcpi_outlet/views/hcpi_outlet_views.xml, scroll to the bottom (around line 216), and find:

<record id="hcpi_outlet_action" model="ir.actions.act_window">
    <field name="name">Outlets</field>
    <field name="res_model">hcpi.outlet</field>
    <field name="view_mode">list,form</field>
    <field name="domain">[]</field>
    <field name="help" type="html">
        <p class="o_view_nocontent_smiling_face">Create an Outlet!</p>
    </field>
</record>

Change the help text:

<p class="o_view_nocontent_smiling_face">No outlets yet. Click "New" to add the first one.</p>

Save. If you're running --dev=xml, just refresh the browser. Otherwise, restart with -u hcpi_outlet.

To see the result, you need the outlet list to be empty — Odoo shows this help text only when there are no records to display. If you have outlets, you can either temporarily archive them all, or apply a filter that excludes everything (search "Without Items" or type a nonsense name into the search box).

Iteration 3: Reorder columns in the list view

Open the same file (hcpi_outlet_views.xml) and find the list view (around line 199):

<list string="">
    <field name="name" optional="show" />
    <field name="outlet_code" optional="show" />
    <field name="address" optional="hide" />
    <field name="consumption_segment_id" optional="show" />
    <field name="outlet_type_id" optional="show" />
    <field name="latitude" optional="hide" />
    <field name="longitude" optional="hide" />
    <field name="description" optional="hide" />
    <field name="outlet_item_count" optional="show" />
</list>

This is the list view definition. Each <field> is a column.

optional="show" — visible by default, but the user can hide it via the column toggle.
optional="hide" — hidden by default, but the user can turn it on.
No optional= — always visible, can't be hidden.

Try this: put outlet_code first (before name).

<list string="">
    <field name="outlet_code" optional="show" />
    <field name="name" optional="show" />
    <field name="address" optional="hide" />
    <field name="consumption_segment_id" optional="show" />
    <field name="outlet_type_id" optional="show" />
    <field name="latitude" optional="hide" />
    <field name="longitude" optional="hide" />
    <field name="description" optional="hide" />
    <field name="outlet_item_count" optional="show" />
</list>

Save → refresh (or -u hcpi_outlet) → look at the outlet list. The code column is now leftmost.

Try optional="hide" on outlet_item_count

Set optional="hide" on outlet_item_count and refresh. The column disappears from the default view. Click the column toggle (top-right of the list) and you can bring it back.

Iteration 4: Add a constant field to the form

This one's slightly bigger — you'll change the form view, not the list. Open hcpi_outlet_views.xml, find the form view (around line 35), and look at the main group:

<group>
    <group>
        <field name="outlet_code" />
        <field name="outlet_type_id" />
        <field name="consumption_segment_id" />
        <field name="address" />
    </group>
    <group>
        <field name="description" />
    </group>
</group>

The outer <group> is a two-column layout. Each inner <group> is one column. Add a field that already exists on the model — say latitude — to the right column:

<group>
    <group>
        <field name="outlet_code" />
        <field name="outlet_type_id" />
        <field name="consumption_segment_id" />
        <field name="address" />
    </group>
    <group>
        <field name="description" />
        <field name="latitude" />
    </group>
</group>

Save → refresh → open any outlet. Latitude now appears under Description in the right column of the form.

(Notice we didn't have to touch the model — latitude is already defined in hcpi_outlet.py. Adding it to a view just makes it visible. Adding a new field would require both a model edit and a view edit — that's the next step beyond this page.)

What you learned

In about half an hour:

The location of menus, actions, and views inside an HCPI module
The edit → upgrade → refresh loop (and the --dev=xml shortcut for view changes)
How to map a UI element to its XML definition via Developer Mode and project-wide search
The difference between modifying a menu label (<menuitem name="..."/>), an action field (<field name="name">...</field>), and a view structure (<field name="latitude"/> inside a <group>)

What's next

The exercises above were view-only — XML on disk, no Python. The next levels involve editing the model:

Add a new field — give hcpi.outlet a notes field of type Text, then show it on the form. This teaches model + view changes together, including the database migration that runs on -u hcpi_outlet.
Add a computed field — a field whose value comes from a Python method (e.g., is_remote based on lat/long). Teaches @api.depends.
Add a button with an action — put a button on the form that, when clicked, calls a Python method. Teaches how UI events reach Python.
Create a small report — a one-page PDF showing an outlet's details. Teaches QWeb templating.

These will be written up in upcoming sections.

For now, the natural next step is Your First Module — build a complete, minimal Odoo module from scratch (model, views, action, menu, security) and uninstall it cleanly when you're done.

Reverting your changes

When you've finished playing, revert if you don't want to keep the edits:

cd /opt/hcpi/custom/HCPI/hcpi_outlet
git status                          # see what you changed
git diff                            # see the actual diff
git checkout -- views/              # discard view changes

(If custom/HCPI/ isn't a git repo on your machine, no harm done — your changes just stay in place until you change them back manually.)

Then restart Odoo once more with -u hcpi_outlet to push the original XML back into the database.