odoo-direct-jsonrpc-access

name

odoo-direct-jsonrpc-access

description

Drive an Odoo 19 tenant's classic /jsonrpc HTTP endpoint (execute_kw) directly with a login+password when you do NOT have MCP tool access or a Bearer API key — e.g. credentials were shared as a plain username/password rather than provisioned as an agent session. Use when calling everjust.app (or any Odoo 19) programmatically from outside the harness: raw curl/Python scripts, background subagents, or CI. Covers auth quirks (password goes in the api-key slot), context passing, batch create/write for bulk imports, idempotent dedup-before-create, and the "private methods cannot be called remotely" boundary. Complementary to [[everjust-platform]] (which assumes MCP/Bearer access and is the source of truth for platform rules like group_ids) — read that first for the rules, use this for the wire protocol when MCP isn't available.

Odoo Direct JSON-RPC Access

Call Odoo 19's classic /jsonrpc endpoint directly over HTTP when you have a login + password (not an MCP session, not a Bearer API key). This is the fallback wire protocol for scripts, background subagents, or CI jobs that need to read/write Odoo data without going through an MCP-connected harness.

Prefer everjust_agent_mcp / Bearer /json/2/ when either is available — see [[everjust-platform]] rule 14: the legacy JSON-RPC/XML-RPC surface is deprecated (removal targeted in Odoo 22). This skill exists for the common case where neither is available yet a task requires programmatic access — e.g. a human shared a login/password directly, or a subagent is running outside the MCP-connected session. Tested against a live Odoo 19 CE tenant (hundreds of reads/creates/writes across a full session); still fully functional as of Odoo 19.

When to use this skill

• You have an Odoo login + password (not an API key, not an MCP tool) and need to read or write tenant data from a plain script (curl, Python, a background subagent).
• You're orchestrating many subagents that each need independent Odoo access without going through a shared MCP session.
• You're bulk-importing a CSV/dataset into Odoo (contacts, companies, CRM records) and need a batching + idempotency pattern that won't time out or duplicate on re-run.

Do NOT use this skill for: platform rules and invariants (mail sending gates, tenant isolation, ACL/role boundaries, which model to use for what) — that's [[everjust-platform]]. This skill is only the wire protocol: how to shape the HTTP call correctly.

Connection recipe (Python)

import json, urllib.request

BASE = "https://<tenant>.everjust.app"   # or any Odoo 19 base URL
DB = "<database_name>"

def rpc(service, method, args):
    payload = {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "call",
               "params": {"service": service, "method": method, "args": args}}
    req = urllib.request.Request(BASE + "/jsonrpc",
                                  data=json.dumps(payload).encode(),
                                  headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"})
    with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=60) as r:
        body = json.load(r)
    if "error" in body:
        raise RuntimeError(body["error"].get("data", {}).get("message")
                            or body["error"].get("message") or json.dumps(body["error"]))
    return body["result"]

def authenticate(login, password):
    return rpc("common", "authenticate", [DB, login, password, {}])

def execute_kw(uid, password, model, method, args, kwargs=None):
    #  the 4th positional arg to execute_kw is normally an API key in
    
    
     rpc(, , [DB, uid, password, model, method, args, kwargs  {}])

Two calls to get moving:

uid = authenticate("[e-mail]", PASSWORD)   # returns an int uid, or False on bad creds
count = execute_kw(uid, PASSWORD, "res.partner", "search_count", [[]])

In practice execute_kw's uid/password pair is stable across calls — most scripts skip a separate authenticate round-trip and just pass a known uid (e.g. 2 for the primary admin) straight into execute_kw, since a bad uid/password combination fails the same way on first use as it would on a dedicated auth call.

Pitfalls

1. context must be nested inside kwargs, not passed positionally. Wrong: execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.users", "create", [vals], {"no_reset_password": True}) — this puts no_reset_password as a field on the record, not a context flag, and Odoo rejects it as an unexpected kwarg. Right:

execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.users", "create", [vals], {"context": {"no_reset_password": True}})

2. Field names drift between Odoo versions — verify, don't assume from memory. On Odoo 19, res.users' groups field is group_ids, not the older groups_id (see [[everjust-platform]] rule 14 for why). When a write against an unfamiliar model fails with an "unexpected keyword" or "invalid field" error, call fields_get first instead of guessing:

execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.partner", "fields_get", [[], ["string", "type", "relation", "selection"]])

3. Batch create/write — don't do one record per round-trip. create accepts a list of vals dicts and creates them all in one call, returning a list of new ids in the same order. For a few hundred to a few thousand records, batch in chunks of ~50–100 (large enough to cut round-trips dramatically, small enough that one failed batch is cheap to retry and diagnose):

ids = []
for i in range(0, len(all_vals), 80):
    chunk = all_vals[i:i+80]
    ids.extend(execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.partner", "create", [chunk]))

Doing this one-by-one for ~1,400 records (a real case) would be ~1,400 sequential HTTP round-trips; batched in 80s it's ~18.

4. Idempotent dedup-before-create for bulk imports. Re-running an import script must not duplicate records. Search for an existing match on a stable natural key (domain, email, or exact name) before creating, and write instead of create on a hit:

existing = execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.partner", "search",
                       [[["website", "=", f"https://{domain}"]]])
if existing:
    execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.partner", "write", [existing, vals])
else:
    new_id = execute_kw(uid, pw, "res.partner", "create", [vals])

For a large batch import, do the search in one call per batch (search_read with an in domain on the natural key) rather than one search per record, then split the batch into create-list and write-list before issuing the two batched calls.

5. Not every method is callable remotely. Private/internal methods (leading underscore, or methods not meant as an API surface) fail with "Private methods ... cannot be called remotely" — e.g. calendar.attendee._send_mail_to_attendees. This isn't a permissions problem; there's no remote path to that method at all. Look for a public wrapper method, or trigger the side effect a different way (e.g. writing a state field that a public method or an automation reacts to) rather than fighting the private one.

6. Timeouts on bulk operations. Batched create/write calls with 80+ records can take 30–90s depending on server load and computed fields. Set timeout=60 to 120 on the urlopen call for bulk operations; the default Python urllib timeout (no timeout at all) will hang indefinitely on a stalled connection instead of failing fast and letting you retry.

Credential handling

Never write the password to disk, a tracked file, or a log line. Read it once (from an environment variable, a secrets file outside the repo, or directly from what the user shared in conversation) and keep it in memory in the script only. Don't print() or echo the credential even partially — treat "leaks the first few characters" the same as leaking the whole thing.

Related skills

• [[everjust-platform]] — the operating rules for everjust.app tenants (mail-sending gates, tenant isolation, which model to use for what, the group_ids field-name gotcha). Read that first; this skill only covers the wire protocol.
• [[everjust-appointments]], [[everjust-crm-sales]], [[everjust-mail-ops]] — the per-app business-object skills for what to actually call once you're connected.