Porting of OpenERP Proxy API to Drupal 7
I met my success in porting the Drupal 6 module, OpenERP Proxy API to Drupal 7 (D7). Now it is working with OpenERP 5 and OpenERP 6. I faced many complications to make the data communication between Drupal and OpenERP. Even though we can have specific methods to tranfer projects, leads anything like these from OpenERP or from Drupal and make both to communicate each other, I wished if I had a specific API module in Drupal 6 my task will be easier. Later, I found this module will do the nice. Thanks to BoogieBug who developped the Drupal6 version
About OpenERP Proxy API
This module provides API for other Drupal modules to interface with the OpenERP via the XML-RPC calls.The API includes authentication, searching, data retrieval, data updating to the OpenERP server. You will need a working OpenERP server to run this module.This module does not provide any user interfaces rather than the administration UI to configure the common OpenERP account information as well as altering the user's profile to allow each user use their own account.
I found some problems with in the latest version of this module It gave me errors like white screen erros , some unknown erros etc.
So before poring this module to D7 I had to solve all these. For a reference I used alpha 2 verion which gave me minimal errors in my Drupal 6 installations.
Key steps to port this module to D7 included:
- Change format of database quires.
- Changing the hook functions according to Drupal7.
- Coding for D7's XML-RPC
Steps 1& 2 are common when we port any Drupal 6 module to drupal7. The XML-RPC request and function calling format is totally different in the case of D7.
After porting this module to Drupal 7 we can create custom modules through which we can keep our OpenERP and Drupal 7 in synchronization. The advantage of using this API is that we can simply make the XML-RPC functions to read,insert,update etc.