Updating Odoo 8 to Odoo 9

07 Jan 2016 by Friedrich Ewald · 3 min read

Currently I’m updating an odoo installation from version 8 to version 9 for a customer. In this post I will give a short introduction, on how to update the installation and most common issues I observed during the update. This post ist not complete since every odoo installation is different. First of all, there is no updater or tutorial offered by the odoo company for the community edition. The company only provides support and updates for the paid enterprise licenses. Since the database structure in odoo changed in so many fields, it is almost impossible, to update the odoo database “by hand” to version 9. The other solution, OpenUpgrade is not yet ready for the current version of the ERP system and therefore also not a possible solution. Instead, I decided to upgrade the custom developed module in a fresh odoo 9 installation. As soon as it works, I install odoo 9 with a fresh database on the server and transfer (export, then import) all the data from 8 to 9. Below is a list with possible problems and the solutions I found for them.

Custom module isn’t shown in the list of apps

In odoo 8, the user has to be a technical user to be able to change the technical settings. This type of user no longer exists in odoo 9. Instead, one has to activate the developer mode of odoo. This is done by clicking on the currently logged in user name in the upper right corner, then about and then “activate developer mode”. After this step, root / administrator users can update the list of apps. In my case I was able to search for my module using the search box in the upper right corner. Updating the list of apps is still necessary but it is more hidden than in the previous version.

Using the old API

The old API is simply no longer supported in odoo 9. My module was using it in some method signatures which I had to update to the new api style, including the method decorator @api.one and @api.multi. All the variables, like cr, context, etc. still exist but have slightly different names now.

Using variable names in email templates

Somehow the use of variable names as it was before is no longer possible. I will update this part as soon as I have a solution for this.

Problems with lessc

If lessc cannot be found it is most likely not installed on the server or, in my case, the symlink to nodejs was wrong. This is easy to fix with

Transfer old data to new database

The data which is needed in the new database has to be transformed to match the new database structure. I my case this was done by copying the old database to a temporary database, then editing the tables exporting them, and importing them afterwards into the new database. It is important to import the data in the right order to not violate foreign key constraints. This list will be updated if new difficulties occur.

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